PRESENT TENSE:THERE WAS, until the mid-1990s, and still surviving in isolated pockets in some houses, a fashion for watching matches on teletext. The telly would be on, and the sound might be Murder, She Wrote, but the picture would be black, apart from that digital writing and pages turning with slow monotony. Occasionally there would be an update: a score would appear; then a scorer. After which, it would return to its flickering stasis, writes SHANE HEGARTY
People talk about listening to cricket on radio as having a meditative quality. Watching a match on teletext, usually while doing something else, but always with eyes glancing at the screen, brought a strange soporific satisfaction. The game was stripped of all its distractions: the commentator, the crowd, the action, the game itself. There was only the score, and a blank tension. And it wasn’t even live, but the result of a few minutes ago.
The fashion lives on in the live text commentary on, most popularly, the BBC and Guardianwebsites. It's taken the teletext approach to a new level. Someone watches a match on a television somewhere in a London office, occasionally tells you what's happening and throws in a few reader e-mails along the way. It is utterly ridiculous. In the BBC's case, it's arguably the last thing public service broadcasting is about. And people love it – although I'm guessing it's mainly men.
Either way, there are many Thursday mornings when you'll log on to the Guardiansite and see that the most-read story of the past 24 hours is its live text commentary of some mid-week clash between Blackburn and Stoke.
Some of these matches are on terrestrial television, so the live text perhaps serves a global audience. However, many of the games are not, and live text commentary offers a surreal act of rebellion against the digital broadcasters who have claimed the sports as their own private property, giving you a peek only if you hand over the cash.
Sky Sports acknowledged this some time ago, when its Sky Sports News channel – available even to the underclasses of digital subscribers – began its Saturday afternoon programmes in which viewers watch ex-footballers watching matches. The live text services take that to its ridiculous extreme. In many ways, it makes a mockery of everything live sport should be about. It’s the kind of thing that the brightest minds in the media universe wouldn’t have thought of if they had a thousand years and immunity from prosecution under the Mental Health Act.
Part of the reason it works, of course, is that there are a great many people who have such an interest in sport that they’ll watch it at all costs, even if it means not actually watching it at all. But perhaps it’s also because the live text offers a comic and subversive alternative to the brash hype of the digital channels in which every match is a clash of the civilisations; a climactic battle; an apocalyptic showdown. LIVE. EXCLUSIVE. ONLY ON SKY SPORTS.
It might only be on Sky Sports, of course, because of what’s happening to Setanta. The thing about sport is that people love it so much they’ll read some stranger’s comments about it on a screen as an alternative to going down the pub and actually watching the thing. And yet, Setanta, as with its rivals, has never fallen down in its duty to over-hype how much you need to see Hearts play Motherwell, because to miss it would be to miss the defining moment of your generation.
Yet, despite its bluster, Setanta went and did something very strange. It gambled on the Premier League understanding that the value did not match the hype, and it lost. Sky bid more; Setanta lost half its matches and it was crippled from that moment.
At the time of going to press, the situation remains uncertain, but the irony is that, should the 23 matches it does own now need to be sold on, the price may be less than Setanta paid. It would mean that the broadcaster would be proven right, but in the most unfortunate manner.
Then again, in a way Setanta represents the ludicrous truth about modern football, which is that it constantly teeters on the brink of disaster, inflated by cash and hype and burdened by debt. In the bubble of sports broadcasting, Setanta was like a property seeker who attempts to value a house at what he thinks it’s worth, not what the market decides it’s worth, and ends up sleeping in his car as a result.
You would think that in a world where people follow other people watching a game, the appetite for coverage would be insatiable. It’s not so simple, of course. But the trick is to not underestimate the price your rivals will pay to get those fans, and to certainly not underestimate the strangeness of sport.