The Curse Of The Commentator
“It’s fascinating isn’t it Ally , that this is the first televised football where the commentary has been audible for over 90 percent of the match , the previous highest being the game between Arsenal and Everton in March of 2025 , and that was at 89 percent.”
“That’s amazing”.
“And if you look back as far as the FA Cup Final in 1963 , there was only commentary during 52 percent of the match , it seems hard to believe but it shows how times have changed.”
“Abso-lutely”
And it’s horrible , and I’ll tell you why in between periods of watching the French Open tennis with the sound turned down. It’s horrible because it steals from us TV- sports -viewers the chance to enjoy a match in the same way that spectators at the ground do. Ongoing conversation isn’t part of the sporting experience , - look at the people in the crowd behind a footballer as he or she takes a throw-in , they may be exchanging pithy remarks , or shouting encouragement to the referee , but they aren’t discussing what happened the last time the teams met or what the manager said about the food when he was in Italy.
They are there for the game , to absorb what’s happening in front of them and around them. It’s as absorbing as an exciting film on the telly, and most people have the same feelings about enjoying sport as they do about what makes for an enjoyable experience watching good drama . Whilst they are watching they may make odd remarks or reply to someone else’s , but having to listen to someone talk all the time would be really , really irritating for most of us. It distracts , because words have an impact we can’t control , when our brains hear speech we have to interpret the words before we can take them in and respond or discount them. Our attention is split .
And then there’s the voices .
There was a time when sports commentators on the TV had learned their trade in front of a radio microphone. They had that job because their diction , cadence , general tone of voice was pleasant , engaging , appealing. Then came the TV-only crew and things descended into the lower reaches of vocal purgatory. Voices that lack any conversational rise and fall , or voices that use the same choppy cadence over and over , the same emphasis chipping into a listener’s brain like it’s being attacked by a woodpecker. Some of these commentators may have started out with a fan’s conversational exuberance and honest expression of their thoughts , but that is soon put aside to be replaced by a vocal manner they can switch on to get the job done. For a lot of men that means a slightly high pitched monotone , indicating brewing excitement , which then goes up a notch or two and down again like a Dalek learning to emote. Portent has to be stirred into the mix somewhere , maybe a kind of depressed portentousness like someone at a funeral trying to have a normal conversation whilst being suitably melancholy , or looming portent mixed with a sort of hyper anxiety like someone on too much or too little medication. You know who they are if you’ve been watching footy on the TV.
And then there’s the number of voices.
There used to be one. One match , one voice. Then came the addition of the ex-player in the commentary box , and they could be quite refreshing , especially the tennis players who were often both articulate and thoughtful. Players know the hard truths of the game and before they get groomed by the media to provide a content-heavy contribution they tend to be direct and to the point . Back then they were not expected to add more than the odd remark , so it worked quite well. But boy , has it changed. Now the quality of the coverage at tennis tournaments is such that it offers you what should be the best seat in the house, were it not for the fact that you have two or three or , count them , four people sitting in the seats behind you who talk all the time in really loud voices at every available moment between and sometimes over the points being played. Some of the ex-players continue to make succinct sense , but for the most part it’s a whiffy pot-pourri of opinion and people being “interesting”. The thing of one commentator asking another an “interesting” question has become a horribly inevitable occurrence , the resulting dialogue spreading into the future like a depressing cloud even before it’s replied to. (Not that it has to be like that , the Test Match teams of commentators for a long time worked in groups and managed to do it with plenty of silences alongside real humour and perception - whether that standard is going to be allowed to continue is a bit of a moot point. But cricket with its day-long action seems to be more amenable to mellow and considered responses , as does athletics .)
Some of this disease can be laid at Covid’s door. The empty stadiums meant games were played in echoing silence and the commentators had their work cut out trying to fill the void left by the crowd so more voices were added to help with the load , and we became accustomed to hearing a gaggle in the commentary box. But also there’s the need for media producers to own their content. The problem they have with sport is that it’s not theirs , the whole spectacle is created by and belongs to the players and the fans . The media companies can only impress themselves on it by what they add either visually , the slo-mo bits here and there and the net-cams and the nasty data pop-ups and the multi-screen , etc. - or in the audio , by the voices they overlay on top of everything. As far as they are concerned , more has to be better . And they get it , sometimes the WSL games have a commentator who struggles to get a word in edgeways against the pundit next to her and I can imagine the producers thinking this is fantastic , “Yeah , that’s great , everybody loves hearing what you have to say, go for it!” (And I’m pretty sure they’re getting to Ally as well , damn them , he’s starting to digress and it’s a downhill slope from there.)
Then we come to what they say and when they say it. Why does anyone think it’s a good idea to have a really tricky , important moment in say a game of snooker , accompanied by some tangential waffle about some previous match or some other piece of extraneous information , as the shots are being played? It’s absurd. And at the absolute critical juncture in some world final , or fifth-set tiebreak , or the putt on the eighteenth hole of the Masters , when there is a total buttock-clenched dead silence from everybody watching , the commentator cannot stop themselves from jutting in even if it’s just to say “You could hear a pin drop” . Yes , we could mate , until you opened your mouth. I suppose the people who get these jobs like to talk and their response to tense moments is probably to gab , and I guess they feel they’re being paid to say something , and it’s a special moment , but the guy who says “and this for the Masters” as Rory draws the putter back has got the sense of occasion of a wheelbarrow. Those are special moments in sport , the culmination of years of toil by the player , years of watching by us , and you can’t add anything to those moments , only detract from them.
Commentary used to be just that , someone giving us comments consisting of what they thought was useful information like who that player is and who they’ve just passed to , and their response to particularly exciting or clever play. Introduce more people into the commentary box and it becomes a conversation , a drama in itself. There is a touch of humour or something that passes for humour , and a question and response , and a concerted effort to mine an “interesting” topic for every last ounce of content . And we have to listen to it. I can’t imagine pleasurably listening to any two people have a conversation for an hour and a half unless they were perhaps , I don’t know , John Lennon and Richard Feynman. With Feynman on bongos. Anybody else , twenty minutes , tops.
What else do they get wrong? How about describing what just happened in detail as a linear chain of events , not just once but over and over again. We saw it too. We were watching , we saw it. YOU DON”T NEED TO TELL US AGAIN , WE FREAKING SAW IT!!. How about starting on a train of thought that should have stayed in the station and then doubling down on it and ploughing on even as something dramatic is unfolding in front of you like the player has nicked the ball and is in the penalty area but you have to plough on with the aimless drivel you started because otherwise you’d be admitting it was aimless drivel….and at that point I shout at the TV and turn the sound down again.
And it really doesn’t have to be like that. I’m watching the quarter-finals of the French Open with no sound. Up until the quarter-finals I had a button on my remote that deals with subtitles and audio , and if I pressed it I was offered two audio streams , one with commentary and one with “no linguistic content”. It was great , every match I could watch along with the Parisian crowd or in relative silence if it was lunchtime in Paris. Then at the quarter-final level that option disappeared . For no reason I can think of unless the highly paid commentators they use for the good matches have something in their contract which means we have to be subjected to their schtick. It’s quite clearly a simple thing to achieve technically. It was a simple thing to have more than one audio stream back in the analogue days when BBC Wales used to offer commentary in Welsh or English on football or rugby matches , and compared to analogue broadcasts the advent of digital was supposed to offer untold new possibilities of viewer-choice. It’s a conspiracy I tell you , a conspiracy of voices demanding to be heard , and all in the wrong way. Time to start a petition to get the Wimbledon coverage and the World Cup with a commentary-less option as a basic human right . Commentators are lovely people I’m sure, with every right to their opinions , and maybe they have many friends who love to wallow in their verbiage , but I’m here to watch some sport which I love , and I’d really like to be granted the respect of being able to enjoy it without extras that aren’t optional.
(And a last thought re the French Open. As usual we keep getting data pop-ups , which is like having a relaxing meal in a restaurant and having the waiter drop by at regular intervals to ask if you’d like any jelly-babies with that , or some cheap wallpaper. It’s a mass of information that carries minimal meaning and adds nothing to the spectacle you’re enjoying , simply distracts you for a moment while your brain deals with it. But it’s content , so it has to go in , or it’s paid for to advertise a brand name , so likewise. The interesting thing is that at this Open , there was one piece of data everybody could relate to , the fact that it was so bloody hot. Coming in from the garden where we’d struggled to lift a cup of tea or think two consecutive thoughts with the thermometer reading 29 degrees , to slump on the couch and watch two players straining every sinew for three or four hours , we might have found that having an occasional little graphic showing that the temperature was at 33 degrees and rising would have added something we could really appreciate. But the Ai wasn’t set up to offer that , and it would have required some human imagination to think of it , so.)
(Et un autre…. Forcing multiscreening with the talking heads in the studio on us at 6-5 in the final set of Sabalenka vs Schneider …while the first points of the final game were being played!!!! merdre!!! ….I ‘ope quelque personne got ze guillotine for zat!!)
