Old rivals

In need of a positive spin from anywhere, ITV can at least console itself with the plaudits for its exclusive live coverage of rugby’s recent World Cup. The oddity (probably unnoticed by most viewers) was that the channel’s senior commentary team and many of its studio sages had been rented for the tournament from its deadly rivals at Sky; rather, I suppose, like old Hollywood times when the likes of Bogart, Grable and Gable were hired out to a competitor for lots of lolly when their own contract studio couldn’t find them a part or, as they used to say, ‘a vehicle’.

I don’t know how much ITV paid for Sky’s star performers, but it has to be said that the main top-of-the-bill double-act of unfussy narrative straight-man Miles Harrison and the articulately outspoken, savvy pontificator Stuart Barnes was worth every penny. Together they illuminated, embellished even, every match they described — at the same time giving, I suspect, every other broadcast channel’s sports department food for serious thought. Especially the BBC.

The climax of the rugby coincided with blanket television coverage of football’s almost completed 2008 European championship qualifiers. Sky and its excellent chief commentator Martin Tyler (standard-setter for such as Harrison) gets more than enough practice with its round-the-clock relays, thank you very much — but not the BBC which, for its England matches, sticks with the shameless flag-waving jingo-jangle of oldie John Motson and his schoolboy stats, accompanied at present by quippy Scouse-Irishman Mark (‘You’re right there, John’) Lawrenson, and backed up by a sniggering platitude of zoot-suited studio ‘pundits’ offering little in the way of analysis or sharp insights. Motty is television’s square peg because he was born to be an enthusiastically vivid radio commentator, as he graphically illustrates every time he’s given an outing on steam.