Jonathan Liew: Whatever happened to all the weird and wonderful sports we used to get on mainstream TV?
In a week that saw some of the greatest sporting shocks of recent times (in increasing order of magnitude: the Wayne Rooney elbow, the ability of the British media to spend an entire week talking about Wayne Rooney’s elbow, Ireland beating England at cricket, the revelation that Ireland played cricket), it may seem a little perverse to slosh in the still pool of yesteryear.
In olden times: Saturday television always used to feature unintelligible interviews with Paul Gascoigne
By Jonathan Liew 7:30AM GMT 07 Mar 2011
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But let me explain what brought it on. It happened on Saturday morning, while searching for some sport to watch. Attempting to choose between the ubiquitous, dull-as-wallpaper Saturday Kitchen and an old Friends episode called, I believe, ‘The One Where Ross Makes Yet More Jokes About His Failed Marriages’, I was stabbed by a sudden and acute pang of nostalgia. When I was young, you see, Saturday mornings were a bewitching, bewildering sporting tumult of which I was a helpless devotee.
It would begin at 8am with a strange little programme called Trans World Sport. Purporting to be a weekly, one-hour global sporting round-up, TWS was in fact a patchwork quilt of preposterous oddments. Every week, the programme would feature little-known sports – sepak takraw, barrel racing, gorodki – from the furthest-flung outposts of the world.
I swear some of these were made up by the producers. Even when mainstream sports were covered, they would be crazy variants of the real thing, such as Batak mud football or Incan sock tennis. Insane. But spellbinding.
Trans World Sport would be followed by Kabaddi. Kabaddi resembles the old playground game of tag, with the inspired twist that while attempting to tag a member of the opposition team, you must chant “Kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi”, and are not allowed to take a breath. Who could fail to love a game so absurd it penalises its participants for breathing? Or a channel so absurd it would put that game on television?
After Kabaddi came the equally idiosyncratic Gazzetta Football Italia. A programme commissioned more or less specifically to follow Paul Gascoigne, it consisted exclusively of fabulous football (a counterpoint to the dreary Premier League at the time), unintelligible interviews with Gazza and long newspaper reviews in which presenter James Richardson would sit at an outdoor café with a bowl of gelato in front of him.
Like pretty much everything Channel 4 did in the mid-1990s, it was all faintly silly. But where is its like today? Trans World Sport still exists, unloved and unwatched on Sky. Italian football is covered, senza Gazza and senza gelato, by ESPN.
In fact, if you look at the schedules of the main channels, sport hardly features at all, save for the ever-dwindling portfolio of live action. Terrestrial sport faces the same issues as terrestrial television – a splintering of its market as fans find their particular needs better met elsewhere. The idea that sport could be presented in a quirky, whimsical style, or even the idea of introducing a new sport to the nation’s screens, appears to be alien these days.
A programme such as Gazzetta or Kabaddi – or even Bullseye, come to that – would never make it onto mainstream TV in 2011. The gradual but tectonic emigration of sport onto specialist channels, as well as the internet and mobile phones, has hived it off into ghettos of convenience – easier for sports fans to find, but more importantly, easier for non-sports fans to ignore.
It may sound strange with the London Olympics on the horizon, but sport has never been less intrinsic to our culture. Those who like it know where to find it; those who do not need scarcely be bothered by it again.
But there is a whole, undecided middle ground, and it consists of people like the nine-year-old me. Fifteen years ago, we would watch breathless Indian men try to tag each other, and learn that sport could be fun and silly and important all at the same time.
Now, I fear, that message is being lost, and never is its absence more keenly felt than in weeks when there is nothing to write about except Wayne Rooney’s elbow.
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