Clare Balding: here, there and everywhere as far as televised sport is concerned It took Des Lynam to say it, but Clare Balding might want to consider sticking to horse racing.
Lynam, the doyen of television sports presenters, emptied both barrels in his sport on TV column in the Telegraph today, accusing the BBC's coverage of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow of being everything from "amateurish" to Alan Partridge-like. And Balding was not immune from his criticism.
Few dare to challenge la Balding's status as a "national treasure", but as the former sports broadcaster of the year continues to appear on all our television and radio channels, sometimes apparently simultaneously, there is a growing sense of the Emperor's New Clothes about the phenomenon.
From fronting Channel 4's horse racing coverage (when she's available), to rugby league for the BBC, to Olympic and Commonwealth Games swimming, through the occasional walking or cycling travel shows on radio and TV, to her little-watched "chat" show on BT Sport, there seems to be no project that Balding will turn down.
"She's in a trap of her own creation," one veteran television sports presenter - not Lynam - told me over lunch at Joe Allen's recently. "While she's flavour of the month, she's almost obliged to accept any reasonable offer of work. We all fear that the next call we get might be the last.
"What it demonstrates is the terrible lack of vision or imagination among some of our broadcasters' top executive producers - or a real dearth of presenting talent. But for Clare it is all a bit double-edged, because if she is over-exposed, the public may get bored of her, or the backlash might be bigger."
Balding, who had the privileged up-bringing of a woman whose father trained race horses for the Queen, knows racing inside out, and is also an adroit live presenter at most sports. Her folksy know-nothing approach can let her down sometimes, though. Such as when anchoring at the Tollcross pool in the past week and she asked how people recognised the black-hatted English swimmers. Neither Mark Foster nor Rebecca Adlington had the heart to point out that the swimmers are all in lanes for their races.
Lynam's broader criticism of BBC Sport's saturation coverage from Glasgow echoes complaints heard increasingly from other sources.
The Blue Peter-isation of BBC sports coverage: not necessarily a direct criticism of those who have graduated from the children's programme, or Newsround, to grown-up sports and news programmes, but some of them really do need to realise that when your audience has an average age of more than 14, constantly patronising them can be a big turn-off.
The often complete absence of what might regarded as journalistic rigour about the cheer-leading style of presentation, with fawning interviews and frequently incoherent commentators, is intended to make sport appealing to those who have no interest in sport, without considering the obvious problem with such an approach.
The NBC-ification of BBC sports coverage: Lynam is from the Grandstand era, when the BBC had a bucket-full of sports rights and took it as its mission to show the best sport, live as it happened.
Oh, how we Brits used to scoff when we heard that American audiences did not see, say, the Olympic 100 metres final live as it happened, but were shown it on tape delay - and sometimes not at all if "Team USA" failed to deliver the anticipated success.
Alas, that's the way the BBC is going, preferring talking heads - often with little insight to offer - and pre-recorded "packages", rather than showing real, live sport.
In Glasgow in the past week, for instance, nothing was shown of the men's high jump final until all had finished, and then just three jumps from the entire competition were broadcast. With the heptathlon - the seven-discipline event in which Jessica Ennis won gold at the London Olympic two years ago - the only second-day element shown live was final 800-metre run.
Red faces on the Red Button: The new-fangled digital offerings clearly need some work. With BBC1/2 and BBC3 providing recorded "features" and "human interest" content introduced by a dozen-strong team of presenters, in theory, the red button ought to allow the BBC to show all the sport, live as it happens, all the time. Yet somehow, at one point this week, the BBC managed to show live lawn bowls on BBC1 and BBC3 at the same time... Seriously.
The red button service for athletics was available only spasmodically, so that some competitions at Hampden Park just did not get shown. This was also where the BBC had hidden away the commentary "talents" of Rob "SHOUTS-every-OTHER-word" Walker and someone who really did sound like Alan Partridge.
Too much of a good thing: No one at BBC Sport appears to have considered that, as Usain Bolt put it, the Commonwealth Games are "a bit shit".
The London Olympics were rightly considered to be The Greatest Show on Earth. Sadly, no one seemed to have told Mishal Husain, the Radio 4 Today presenter, that she was at something called the Commonwealth Games and not at the Olympics, as she seemed to think on the first weekend of competition when doing the post-Breakfast Time slot. #Awkward
Wall-to-wall coverage for 12+ hours a day on BBC1/2 may have been justified for the Olympic Games, but Glasgow 2014 was not London 2012. An event called the "triathlon mixed relay", in which there were just nine competing teams, including one from the Isle of Dogs, and in which one of the competitors did breaststroke on the swim (and only one of those stats is made-up) really doesn't cut it as world-class sport deserving of more than an hour's live coverage.
Not that any of this is likely to see the senior producers at BBC Sport change what, undoubtedly, will be described as their "direction of travel" when they get together in one of their "break-out areas" at the head office in Salford.
Lynam, the doyen of television sports presenters, emptied both barrels in his sport on TV column in the Telegraph today, accusing the BBC's coverage of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow of being everything from "amateurish" to Alan Partridge-like. And Balding was not immune from his criticism.
Few dare to challenge la Balding's status as a "national treasure", but as the former sports broadcaster of the year continues to appear on all our television and radio channels, sometimes apparently simultaneously, there is a growing sense of the Emperor's New Clothes about the phenomenon.
From fronting Channel 4's horse racing coverage (when she's available), to rugby league for the BBC, to Olympic and Commonwealth Games swimming, through the occasional walking or cycling travel shows on radio and TV, to her little-watched "chat" show on BT Sport, there seems to be no project that Balding will turn down.
"She's in a trap of her own creation," one veteran television sports presenter - not Lynam - told me over lunch at Joe Allen's recently. "While she's flavour of the month, she's almost obliged to accept any reasonable offer of work. We all fear that the next call we get might be the last.
"What it demonstrates is the terrible lack of vision or imagination among some of our broadcasters' top executive producers - or a real dearth of presenting talent. But for Clare it is all a bit double-edged, because if she is over-exposed, the public may get bored of her, or the backlash might be bigger."
Balding, who had the privileged up-bringing of a woman whose father trained race horses for the Queen, knows racing inside out, and is also an adroit live presenter at most sports. Her folksy know-nothing approach can let her down sometimes, though. Such as when anchoring at the Tollcross pool in the past week and she asked how people recognised the black-hatted English swimmers. Neither Mark Foster nor Rebecca Adlington had the heart to point out that the swimmers are all in lanes for their races.
Lynam's broader criticism of BBC Sport's saturation coverage from Glasgow echoes complaints heard increasingly from other sources.
The Blue Peter-isation of BBC sports coverage: not necessarily a direct criticism of those who have graduated from the children's programme, or Newsround, to grown-up sports and news programmes, but some of them really do need to realise that when your audience has an average age of more than 14, constantly patronising them can be a big turn-off.
The often complete absence of what might regarded as journalistic rigour about the cheer-leading style of presentation, with fawning interviews and frequently incoherent commentators, is intended to make sport appealing to those who have no interest in sport, without considering the obvious problem with such an approach.
The NBC-ification of BBC sports coverage: Lynam is from the Grandstand era, when the BBC had a bucket-full of sports rights and took it as its mission to show the best sport, live as it happened.
Oh, how we Brits used to scoff when we heard that American audiences did not see, say, the Olympic 100 metres final live as it happened, but were shown it on tape delay - and sometimes not at all if "Team USA" failed to deliver the anticipated success.
Alas, that's the way the BBC is going, preferring talking heads - often with little insight to offer - and pre-recorded "packages", rather than showing real, live sport.
In Glasgow in the past week, for instance, nothing was shown of the men's high jump final until all had finished, and then just three jumps from the entire competition were broadcast. With the heptathlon - the seven-discipline event in which Jessica Ennis won gold at the London Olympic two years ago - the only second-day element shown live was final 800-metre run.
Red faces on the Red Button: The new-fangled digital offerings clearly need some work. With BBC1/2 and BBC3 providing recorded "features" and "human interest" content introduced by a dozen-strong team of presenters, in theory, the red button ought to allow the BBC to show all the sport, live as it happens, all the time. Yet somehow, at one point this week, the BBC managed to show live lawn bowls on BBC1 and BBC3 at the same time... Seriously.
The red button service for athletics was available only spasmodically, so that some competitions at Hampden Park just did not get shown. This was also where the BBC had hidden away the commentary "talents" of Rob "SHOUTS-every-OTHER-word" Walker and someone who really did sound like Alan Partridge.
Too much of a good thing: No one at BBC Sport appears to have considered that, as Usain Bolt put it, the Commonwealth Games are "a bit shit".
The London Olympics were rightly considered to be The Greatest Show on Earth. Sadly, no one seemed to have told Mishal Husain, the Radio 4 Today presenter, that she was at something called the Commonwealth Games and not at the Olympics, as she seemed to think on the first weekend of competition when doing the post-Breakfast Time slot. #Awkward
Wall-to-wall coverage for 12+ hours a day on BBC1/2 may have been justified for the Olympic Games, but Glasgow 2014 was not London 2012. An event called the "triathlon mixed relay", in which there were just nine competing teams, including one from the Isle of Dogs, and in which one of the competitors did breaststroke on the swim (and only one of those stats is made-up) really doesn't cut it as world-class sport deserving of more than an hour's live coverage.
Not that any of this is likely to see the senior producers at BBC Sport change what, undoubtedly, will be described as their "direction of travel" when they get together in one of their "break-out areas" at the head office in Salford.
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