And while I am on the subject, Sky has – surprise! surprise! – outbid the BBC for Rugby Union Six Nations coverage.
My Rugby preference has always been the League version, but I enjoy watching Union, particularly the Six Nations. In fact, I enjoy watching the Six Nations as much as pretty well any sporting competition. The BBC’s coverage this year was near enough perfect, capturing the occasion and drama as only the BBC can and bringing it to as many people as possible which only terrestrial television can. But money talks.
Money talks and Sky has lots of it. The BBC has less of it and soon it will have less still once George Osborne turns it into a benefit paying service too, with it having to shell out £700m to pay for free licence fees to the over 75s. Nice for our senior citizens – it is something I strongly support – but what will be left for them, and us, to watch?
If Rugby Union was on free to air television – and I include in this the Premiership too, as well as European competition – it would rival football as our national sport. If it was broadcast at the right time of the day and the week, previewed and programmed aggressively, the audience would grow rapidly. Television can do this. But tucked away on cable TV, it is merely a sport for a significant minority. Nearly 10 million people watched the exciting climax of last year’s Six Nations. How would it possibly benefit the sport to confine coverage to a figure that could end up being a tenth of that?
Sport as a national pastime, as an essential requisite for the national psyche, at a time of rising obesity and general unfitness, should be promoted more than ever, not merely confined to the affluent middle class viewers. But Rupert Murdoch doesn’t care about that and neither do the politicians or sports administrators.
The shared experience is leaving us, that moment when you meet with others and discuss something amazing you all watched together. This is of course a by-product of the new multi-channel era where you have a choice of hundreds of channels on which you can watch repeats of shows you watched years before, but isn’t the shared experience worth keeping?
