Get Yer Hobknobs Ready

A friend summed it up nicely the other day in an email:

“Its strange that, although you work on all those football matches and other sports events, I don't picture you as a sports-fan so-to-speak, more of a music guru! Are you enthusiastic about sport, or is it just the radio production and related side of it that you're passionate about?”

I will quite freely confess that the last thing I ever expected to end up doing as an adult was helping to broadcast live sport. Sporting action just didn’t register on the family radar, with my father almost apparently unique in having no interest in football or any kind of sport whatsoever. Unlike just about everyone else I work with, my childhood was absent from any kind of cultivation of a love of the game. The closest I ever came to sharing a love of sporting action was watching Wimbledon with my mother or the Saturday afternoon wrestling with my grandmother. I was at university before I followed a football season from start to finish for the first time, and even that was only because I’d discovered the betting possibilities of studying football form via a series of computer programs.

Yet I wouldn’t change any aspect of my job for a moment. Sporting action is for me, the purest and most dramatic form of entertainment that there is. No other aspect of popular culture, no other element of our society encourages thousands of people to join together for an intense period of time in a single shared experience. Sports events are where lives are changed. With one moment of brilliance, or even in one split second lapse in concentration, reputations can be made, legends can be created, moments of history destined to be replayed time and time again will take place and the actions of a small group of people will perhaps be indelibly etched on the emotional memories of those watching. If you cannot participate yourself, then what better way to be a part of it than to be the one responsible for sharing it with a wider audience, or in radio terms, providing the soundtrack of those moments for posterity.

Think back to any great sporting moment, and an integral part of that memory is the broadcast commentary that accompanies it. Geoff Hurst’s goal in the 1966 World Cup Final is forever associated with the words “he’s got… some people are on the pitch, they think it’s all over”, the moment Damon Hill won the Formula One world championship marked not so much by the waving of the chequered flag but by Murray Walker confessing that he has to “stop talking, because I’ve got a lump in my throat” whilst the expression “It’s up for grabs now” will forever transport Arsenal fans back to the magical moment that Michael Thomas swept forward in the dying seconds of the 1989 football season to give them the title.

It is potential moments like that which I get to be a part of week in week out, even if it is just under the banner of “producer”. That title alone makes for an interesting divide in the office. Most of my other colleagues are also producers, but their job involves endless amounts of preparation. Most talk radio shows are all about the “setup”, the pre-broadcast booking of the guests, planning of the running orders and the step by step mapping of where each show should be taken. I’ve tried that, and I’m not very good at it, so have the utmost respect for those who do it day in day out. My job is more seat of the pants, flying without a safety net (quite literally, given that mine is the only show on the station that routinely switches off the seven second digital delay) or very often a full running order. I’m the one who goes into the studio with a rough plan of what will happen for the first 40 minutes or so, but beyond that we might as well just sit there with a blank piece of paper. I love that I start out not knowing what is going to happen by the end, the ultimate judgement coming based on how we react when it happens.

Perhaps more exciting that any of this, is the opportunity to have to push the boundaries a little, to experiment with the way we stage sport on the radio. I’ve talked before about how for the most part, sports commentary has changed very little in the past 60 years or so, a broadcast of a football match today sounding much the same as it might have done a generation earlier, with only the tone of the voices and the quality of the sound differentiating one from the other. Compare this to the way television coverage of all sports, not just football, has come on in leaps and bounds thanks to the outside of the (six-yard) box thinking by Sky and others. A 21st century broadcast of an event on television feels like a totally different world to that of the same presentation from the 1970s. I see no reason at all why radio should not evolve in the same way.

Naturally you cannot reinvent the wheel just for the sake of it. A large part of the reason why sports presentation has remained the same for so long is that it works and suits the needs of the audience just fine. Nonetheless there are still ways you can push at the edges and maybe grow the horizons just a little. Throughout the last season on talkSPORT’s Saturday afternoon Match Day Live show we’ve tried to cast off some of the traditional shackles of sports presentation. Ditching in-match continuity was a major start. A commentator shouldn’t need to break off from his concentration on the action to laboriously introduce his colleague at another game. We’re not just at one game after all, we are at all of them. Consequently we tried to make it sound like all the matches were live all at once, with reporters arriving on the scene as part of the flow of the conversation as if they had been waiting patiently for their turn all along. It wasn’t perfect, and the difficulties of coordinating the moment when one presenter at one match knows when not to speak at the same time as his colleague at the other end of the country dives in to say his piece cannot be underestimated. Many was the Saturday afternoon when I ended up as a nervous wreck after 90 minutes of shouting “Chelsea will follow.. come off the back… no, wait missed the moment… CUE!!…. don’t apologise Nigel, just pay attention…. goal at Boro will follow… no, not there.. PICK UP” ad nauseum. There are still ways of doing it better, and it is to my deep frustration that I’ve figured out a better system deep in the middle of the closed season.

Commentary development need not be confined to football either, and for the past two weeks or so I’ve had the enormous privilege of being part of something rather magical. The occasion was the ICC World Twenty20 Cricket tournament for which we had official broadcast rights. Twenty20 cricket is something we’ve broadcast for the past few years as rightsholders for the domestic cup competition, but each time I’ve always felt something was lacking. The problem was we were using broadcasters who had been schooled in the Test Match Special way of thinking, where the game was played at a relaxed and genteel pace and where the description of the action was almost secondary to the background chatter itself. Naturally that works well for something like a Test Match, where the action itself might come once every 15 minutes or so, but Twenty20 is different.

So my colleagues and I sat down with our presenters and spelled it out to them. Twenty20 is rock and roll cricket. It is played at a frantic, almost frightening pace. Your batsmen have just 120 deliveries to play with so every single one has to count for something, and just as crucially every run conceded by the fielders could be the difference between winning and losing. During the course of the last two and a half weeks we have been witness to some of that thinking, with fielders resorting to dramatic aerobatics to stop three runs turning into a four, and with batsmen taking wild risks to snap at a full toss that might or might not turn into a catch which under normal circumstances they would just parry away. The presentation had to reflect the knife edge nature of the game, the palpable tension that surrounded the ground, and the intense emotion that everyone from player to spectator was caught up in. To our joy they responded magnificently.

The high point came exactly a week ago for England’s Super Eights match against India. Having been resoundingly beaten by South Africa three days earlier, the tournament hosts knew nothing less than a victory was required to prevent an ignominious exit from the competition. It was against this backdrop that we were set to describe the action to the nation and with the majority of the match called by the combination of Ronnie Irani and Darren Gough. I don’t know what it was, whether it was the yin and yang combination of Yorkshire and Lancashire accents colliding together, the sheer infectious enthusiasm of Ronnie in his comfort zone and talking passionately about the game that has dominated his life, or just Goughie’s homespun pearls of wisdom and a magnificent turn of phrase, all delivered in the kind of rich mellifluous tones that transported me back to the characters who populated the tiny Yorkshire village in which I grew up but the two men somehow managed to sweep you up in a bewildering mix of enthusiasm, excitement and ultimately tension as India crept agonisingly close to the adequate but by no means out of reach target they had been set by our boys.

For the last fifteen minutes of the game, not a single one of us in the control room said a word or even dared to breathe. We were just sat transfixed as the men on the end of the line delivered one of the most exciting and invigorating radio broadcasts I’d heard for a long time.

Don’t just take my word for it. From the moment the final delivery was bowled, the lines to the studio switchboard lit up. Normally a post-match phone in on the radio is dominated by the events on the pitch and the aspects of the game that have particularly stimulated the callers. Not this time. Just about every call was ringing up to heap praise upon the broadcast they had just heard, people insisting they were not cricket fans but could not bear to tear themselves away from the action or by contrast to say they had been fans of the game for life but had never before been caught up in an atmosphere like it or heard their favourite sport communicated in such a way.

Frustratingly this whole event is for the moment something of a one-off. Most other cricket rights are tied up with other broadcasters and in truth it is only the Twenty20 format of the game that lends itself to such balls-out seat of the pants style. There is very little credit that either I or my production colleagues on-site could claim for the show either, given that our input was restricted to telling the commentators to talk in the manner we requested and then sit back for 90 minutes at a time. Even so, it was something of a privilege to play a part, however small, in a broadcast that elicited a response quite unlike anything I’ve experienced in 15 years in this business.

So my friend is correct. It is very strange that I spend my working life on events that I’d probably pay little or no attention to were I not being paid to do so. Believe me when I say this, I would not have it any other way.