Cheap and cheerful coverage of the Africa Cup of Nations shows Match of the Day that content not dressing is key
I didn't want to write about Match of the Day. Match of the Day! Is there anything less fraught with bleeding-edge interest than the BBC's flagship football highlights?blah? Instead I had planned to make an effort towards filling the combine harvester-sized void left here by the temporary absence of my illustrious colleague, TV-watching's Martin Kelner, by writing about something more current.
With this in mind I sat down to watch ESPN's new Saturday evening football show Off The Ball. It looked promising too: urbane, humorous men on a sofa; spiky badinage; a sense of oblique, even oddly familiar satire, in particular ? hang on a minute ? from the figure seated centre stage dispensing gobbets of delicately stitched football joke-chat. Yes! My illustrious colleague, TV-watching's Martin Kelner! There he was in the flesh, risen up out of the primal swamp of his perma-sofa and standing before us proudly erect, walking on his hind legs among sacred apes of the screen.
This sense of exhilaration was only slightly blunted by the realisation that a Martin Kelner-esque TV review of Martin Kelner's TV programme in Martin Kelner's Monday slot might be slightly too meta, too incestuously spliced even for these pages. Not to mention likely to engender the kind of reality-eats-itself moment common in fast-paced Hollywood films, whereby it would be necessary to find myself waking from uneasy Kelner dreams transported into a Kelner world where Kelner men walk Kelner dogs and tiny Kelners pour forth from the cereal packet into my Kelner-shaped bowl and while raising my Kelner hands to my Kelner face to scream I'm shaken awake and open my eyes to find the familiar face of Martin Kelner staring into my terrified Kelner features while ?
Luckily none of this had to happen because Match of the Day came on shortly afterwards and for all its infuriating flabbiness it remains an unscratchable itch of a TV football show. Particularly when Gary Lineker makes jokes. "West Brom are Stoke's bogey team. Was it time to flick that bogey away?" Lineker asked at one point. I have no problem with this, even the enforced mental picture of Lineker's bogies, which I imagine are crisp and well-formed, lustrous but powerfully textured like small bespoke truffles and infused with a tacky muscularity that gums instantly to the perforated leather interior of a BBC-issue chauffeured saloon.
Match of the Day is a remarkable programme these days, chiefly for the mild but tangible sense of infuriation it engenders. This is quite an achievement: on the face of it MotD is a plucky outsider, the lone free-to-air beacon in the smothering satellite takeover of top-tier English football but still transformed in a certain section of the public mind into a great saggy overblown object of popular derision. Whose fault is this?
It is tempting to blame the magnificently grand MOTD studio, with its tripplily shifting liquid graphics, its bold blocks of zany colour, its vaulted ceilings. When the recumbent Alan Hansen announces "David Dunn hits the post. So unlucky. It could easily have gone in" amid such moon-age splendour it is like dropping a single pebble from the gallery of St Paul's cathedral and hearing is tiny puttering echo disappear. Never has such harmless inanity been coddled in such vibrant grandeur.]
I think mainly it is the pundits, who are good individually but together seem trapped gargoyle-like within a lugubrious cocoon of complacency. "Mick McCarthy will be fighting to the bitter death but at the end it's all about quality" was Hansen's verdict on Wolves' defeat by Aston Villa, which he'd just seen on TV, just like we had, and Hansen has a wonderful ruined potency these days, his circuit boards dulled by repetition but somehow puttering away all the same like a much venerated hand-me-down petrol lawnmower still grandly chugging through its robot gears.
It is a shame that this was the BBC's main football event of the weekend as there was a seductive alternative available in the Africa Cup of Nations, which began on Saturday night, and has been covered well by the corporation in the past. Instead the tournament opener ? hosts Equatorial Guinea versus Libya ? was on Eurosport, helmed by Wayne Boyce and Stewart Robson.
Robson of course is a former Arsenal favourite turned ruminative jobbing pundit but Boyce is a new one on me, albeit it is impossible to keep track of the suffocating superfluity of football commentators, a side product of the digital age where the commentator has been hothoused and battery-farmed, mercilessly cloned in great striding secret stormtrooper columns.
But what a pro! Eurosport's coverage was a non-studio affair, reducing Wayne and Stewart to faceless voices and hurling us straight into the fag-end of the opening ceremony, which with London 2012 looming like an embarrassing family party, became unnaturally interesting.
Equatorial Guinea did a fine job, combining low cost spotlights, a firework meltdown, and low cost frisky hip-wiggling middle-aged ladies to create a fevered kaleidoscope. Really, this is all you need: no folk history please, no single sad-eyed child singing Jerusalem on a hammock woven from Lord Coe's discarded chest hair. Just a bit of life and some bangs.
The received ideas surrounding African football have skipped between competing cliches in recent times. Where once the talk was all of defensive "naivety", self-expression and the obligatory pre-match juju frenzy, neurotic defensive caution has taken over ? vast rippling centre halves hoofing the ball miles downfield like a tiny balloon in those scrolling African skies. Here Libya were more fluid and the hosts only a little crude, presided over by their Brazilian manager dressed in the biscuit-coloured suit and shirt of a suave international jewel thief. ]
Conveyed with a sense of urgency by Boyce and Robson, it was an absorbing spectacle. "It's a goal!" Wayne shrieked as the hosts bagged their late winner ? and the promised $1m government reward for victory. Equatorial Guinea duly went ballistic, a gorgeous pandemonium enhanced by the random editing and the sense of something only heatedly glimpsed, all emphasis on the content not the dressing. Cheap and cheerful, punkishly rendered, curt in its production: perhaps this may even be a way forward for the BBC's flagship show. Dilute the grandeur and the jaw-jaw. Make it all less of a big deal. After all, if this weekend proved anything, it is that pretty much anyone can get on TV these days anyway.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/jan/22/gary-lineker-africa-screen-break
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