Sport being shown live on TV elicits mixed responses. On one side there are the sports fans, who welcome being able to watch their favourite sport. On the other side you have people who are upset that they’re not able to watch whatever they’re used to watching that has now been usurped by a sports match.
I fall into the former category, so you can guess which direction this blog is going in.
Sport plays an important part in any society. For one thing, it brings people together.
People from all walks of life end up being brought together as a result of supporting the same team. And it can have important implications – Nelson Mandela wearing a Springbok jersey at the 1995 Rugby World Cup had a far greater impact than any speech he could have made.
Sport is a form of entertainment. Granted, it might not be very entertaining if your team is losing, but when you think about it, sport is the ultimate reality show.
It’s unscripted (with the possible exception of cricket), and can provide far more enjoyment, disappointment and tension than any TV show. The emotions that you see displayed by sportsmen are far more genuine than that of any reality show contestant, and if you’re looking for good acting, look no further than a top-flight soccer player being tackled.
Sport is a form of escapism. For many people, the weekend’s game is a way of getting away from the troubles of their everyday life. For a few hours they can forget about every else.
Something else that sport does is offer hope. There are plenty of sport-related rags-to-riches stories, and many of these sportsmen set up their own upliftment programmes, giving something back to their community. Yes, not everyone is going to make it, but the dream of making it big needs to be there.
Because sport is so important, it needs to be made available to the public, which means that it needs to be shown on television. It’s obviously impractical to show every single sporting event, but the government has insisted that all soccer, rugby and cricket matches (the three biggest sports in South Africa) involving the national team played in South Africa be made available on free-to-air TV, thus reaching as large an audience as possible. There are many things for which you can criticise the government, but personally I think they’ve got this one right.
I’m not oblivious to the fact that sport does play havoc with TV schedules, and there are times when one’s favourite show is displaced, which can be highly annoying. But I feel that sport’s importance to society means that it should be shown.
Having put forward a case for showing sport, I’m now going to look at some of the arguments against showing it.
“I don’t like [insert sport here]”
This may be the case, but do you like everything that’s on TV? Nobody’s forcing you to watch it, and believe it or not, there are other forms of entertainment besides TV.
If you don’t like it, don’t watch it. It’s as simple as that.
“It’s not worth showing sport as not enough people watch it”
That’s not true. There definitely is an audience for sport, and while it may not draw in as many viewers as Generations, it does attract the viewers. In some cases, the sports event attracts more viewers than the show(s) it replaced would have been expected to do so.
“Why can’t they put it on another channel?”
Or in other words – Why can’t someone else’s viewing be disrupted? The way it stands at the moment, SABC1 shows soccer, SABC2 rugby and SABC3 cricket.
Not only does this mean that the load is spread across three channels, but they’re also shown on the channel which caters for their traditional audience – black, Afrikaans and English respectively. That’s probably the best way of doing it, and for once the SABC has done something sensible and logical.
“Why has it suddenly turned into a sports channel?”
This is a bit of an odd one, but I’ve seen comments by people complaining about the sport on TV, and their complaint appears to imply that it’s something new. This I don’t get, as it’s not as though it hasn’t happened before.
In fact, ever since the end of South Africa’s sporting isolation, live international sport (in particular cricket, which is the sport that seems to bear the brunt of this complaint) has replaced regular programming. Cricket season mean disruption to TV schedules – it’s been going on for years, and it looks set to continue for the foreseeable future.
“They don’t let us know about the schedule changes”
This is one argument that I actually agree with. The SABC has a shoddy record when it comes to advertising their regularly scheduled programmes, and sport suffers as well.
You need only look at the way they messed around with Survivor during the recent T20 World Cup. Instead of doing what everyone thought they would and not show it while the World Cup was on, they messed about with its timeslot, and failed to give adequate warning that they had done so.
Another example would be the recent Rugby World Cup semifinal between England and France. Despite claiming that all the matches are live, and despite three sources that I came across stating otherwise, the SABC decided to show a delayed broadcast of the match.
I’m sure a lot of the frustration people feel about sport on TV could be alleviated if the SABC got their act together. Then again, a lot of the frustration about TV in general could be alleviated if the SABC got their act together.
I don’t know if I’ve managed to convince you, but I did try. And for what it’s worth, I’m still going to continue to crusade for sport’s right to be shown on TV.