TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS passage of play in a contest involving many people over a brief

94 TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS passage of play in a contest involving many people over a brief

period. It can be chaotic, but it’s rule- governed. The narrative is open, like a soap: even the conclusion of a season is never the con- clusion of the seemingly endless competition that marks out this genre. Sport is an intensely emotional program- type, but without recourse to close- ups or personal verbalization in quite the same way as drama. Instead, there is a direct address of such issues to the audience by commentators, as well as a textual mirror of the audi- ence via the crowd.

Like theatre, live sport has been central to television from the first. In 1931, the Encyclopedia Britannica illustrated the possibilities of the new medium by referring to the prospect of live athletics coverage (Settel and Laas 1969: 35). And from very early on, sport and TV “got together like bacon and eggs. . . . Like algae and fungi in moss” (Claeys and van Pelt 1986: 98). They shared a sense of immediacy, of happening at the instant that they were seen. Sport offered television well- defined spatial and temporal co- ordinates alongside spontaneity and surprise, and costs met by event organiz- ers. It epitomized the culture industries’ blend of repetition and difference brokered through pleasure. Smythe saw televised sport as “a representation of the human condition,” an

image of skillful use of trained bodies . . . or gross sex aggression . . . competing for survival without the benefit of accepted law . . . a form of folk- drama . . . a sardonic morality story, or perhaps

a means of reassuring cynical viewers that life is fixed from the start. (1954: 144–5)

The Nazis regarded sport as a key part of TV propaganda in the

1930s. Perhaps 150,000 Berliners saw the 1936 Olympics in public viewing rooms. London viewers watched cricket in 1938, and New York TV presented live wrestling, football, and baseball a year later. The first pictures of a disaster (a New York fire) came through because cameras were at a nearby swimming pool. In the US, pre- war attempts to popularize TV- watching promoted collective viewing in bars of wrestling and boxing. In the 1950s, the networks discovered that Westerns and situation comedies were attracting large audiences, but comprised of people without large disposable

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incomes. The target viewer selected in their stead was the young adult urban male, for whom sport was a priority (Lever and Wheeler 1993: 127; Uricchio 2008: 298; Hickethier 2008: 71; Whannel 1985: 62; Geurens 1989: 57; Settel and Laas 1969: 43; Harmond 1979: 82–3; Kersta 1942: 117–18; Parente 1977: 130).

Technological developments made televised sport increasingly manageable and increasingly spectacular. An initial model that rep- licated the view from a grandstand seat has changed in the light of the capacity to flit between many seats in many places. This and other refinements took place over half a century via such innova- tions as parabolic reflector microphones, mobile cameras, color, video recording and editing, caption generation, computer- aided design and drafting, video amplifiers to adjust the framing of an existing shot, international switching grids, chalkboards, and cameras in stumps, nets, helmets, and dirigibles (for the early history, see Whannel 1992: 64–6).

The first network broadcast in the US was a 1945 football game with President Harry S. Truman in the stadium, binding together sport, politics, and corporate power in a symbolic whirl that pres- aged the central role of sport in the emergent TV system (Gomery 2008: 233, 235–6). In Canada, the stimulus to establishing televi- sion came from the fact that people were already viewing sport from across the border (Cavanagh 1992: 305). In the UK, the first slow- motion replay came in 1962, during coverage of the Grand National horse race. The 1970 World Cup from Mexico was the first major event carried via satellite in color. Color television enabled snooker to become a TV sport – in black and white, it had been too difficult to distinguish the balls being potted. And a boxing bout between Frank Bruno and Mike Tyson inaugurated pay- per-view in 1996 (Low 2009; Bignell and Orlebar 2005: 150).

This history informed Murdoch’s infamously indelicate, albeit honest, remark in 1996 that his companies “use sports as a ‘batter- ing ram’ ” to draw in subscribers – in the UK, that’s the only genre Murdoch and his fellow capitalists invest in significantly. By 2006,

60 percent of Sky subscribers who followed football bought its service just because of English Premier League coverage (Murdoch, quoted in Papathanassopoulos 2002: 197; Ofcom 2009: 4; Ofcom and Human Capital 2006: iii). Subscription television in Australia really grew because crucial sporting events were captured from