TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS broadcast networks in 2008 – qualifying games in the men’s World

96 TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS broadcast networks in 2008 – qualifying games in the men’s World

Cup of football and Twenty20 cricket (“Subscription Television” 2008). In the US, the extraordinary intertextuality and variety of sport mean that cable stations that lack the financial backbone of broadcast networks to buy top events still see sport as a ratings winner. The strategy is proving crucial in the Kenyan struggle to dominate satellite, with British money that owns the rights to English football suddenly dominant (Wandera 2008). And despite the desire to bind the Canadian nation together through TV hockey, when networks wanted to target specific territories and could do so thanks to localizing technologies, they tailored cover- age to particular markets. Neither tendency reflected or encour- aged multiculturalism, as we can see from the racism and sexism of core commentators (Beaty and Sullivan 2006: 96–7, 141).

These technological and legal changes are siphoning sports away from broadcast TV and onto cable, satellite, and pay- per-view. As such, they are an instance of commercial television belatedly learn- ing from public television. Many sports were built up by public broadcasters, only for cautious but wealthy capitalist companies to buy the innovations. This happened with basketball in the US, which was pioneered on television by San Francisco’s public station; cricket and rugby union around the world (developed as spectator sports by public networks in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand); and football across Europe. In 1995, there were just three sports channels in Europe; by 2000, there were sixty (Papathanas- sopoulos 2002: 189). ITV tried to resurrect its business by purchas- ing rights to the 2008–9 FA Cup, a failing competition that had been restored to fame through heavy BBC marketing – which promptly lost the rights to its unimaginative commercial rivals at a price that helped to send ITV to the brink financially (Gibson

2009a; Dyke 2009). Britain’s regulator, Ofcom, promulgates a list of sports “of national interest” that should be available on broadcast rather than satellite TV (2008a). Why? Seven of the nine most popular pro- grams on BBC 1 in 2006 and three of the top five on ITV1 were World Cup matches (Ofcom 2007: 106). Events such as the summer Olympics are held to be symbolic agents that display and generate consensual values in the community while it is undergo- ing structural adjustment to social change. The integrative and har-

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monious aspects of social life are celebrated and emphasized in such accounts. They represent a functionalist strand in public policy and social research that emphasizes the allegedly consensual aspects to very conservative views of family, economic, and audience life (for examples of such reasoning applied to US TV, see Rothenbuhler 1988, 1989).

Sports also come and go with TV history. Consider wrestling. After great successes with women viewers in the 1940s and 1950s on US television, its popularity with the networks fell away, a victim of their desire for the male spectator’s disposable income. TV re- introduced the sport in the 1980s, using hand- held cameras in extreme close- ups of the action to emphasize spectacle. Wres- tling’s return involved a new address to women, and revised rules. Quick falls, tightly circumscribed moves, and rigorous refereeing were forsaken. In their stead came spectacular circus- like activity, dominated by absurd persons in silly costumes, adopting exotic personae and seeking the acrobatic and the showy as means of success, and TV Studies 2.0 narcissographers in search of carnival to celebrate (Geurens 1989: 57–8; 61, Sammond 2005).

This renewed interest in female spectators has had profound impacts on television sport. In the early 1990s Canada, a beer company that owned the sports cable network TSN, sought an iso- morphism of sporting content, audience, and beer intake by living up to its advertising motto: “We deliver the male.” As late as 1998, an advertisement for ESPN in Broadcasting & Cable magazine prom- ised “More tackles, less tutus.” But commercial and cultural changes are exerting tremendous pressure on the normativity of sport, endangering the seemingly rock- solid maleness at its core. Far from seeing sport as unacceptable and unwanted, female US spectators tune to the Olympics in large numbers. The 1992 Winter Games