Dear Sky...

I appreciate that you probably paid stupid money for the IPL rights but please stop plugging the arse out of it during a test match.

If I tuned in to watch the test I did so for a reason.

I'm highly unlikely to suddenly feel the need to switch over to watch the Delhi Belly Daredevils versus the Bombay Sapphire Gin Palaces mid-test despite Ian Ward's frequent invitations to do so.

The worst bit was when he actually advertised Bumble making a twat of himself in commentary - RIGHT NOW ON THE OTHER CHANNEL.

Wow. Yeah. I tune in for the commentary.

Lindsay no.2 wrote: ...."to watch the Delhi Belly Daredevils versus the Bombay Sapphire Gin Palaces"

Noice.

I thought the thread was going to be a secular version of "Dear God in Heaven!". .... but then again, I suppose it is.

Brass Monkey wrote:The worst bit was when he actually advertised Bumble making a twat of himself in commentary - RIGHT NOW ON THE OTHER CHANNEL.

Wow. Yeah. I tune in for the commentary.

Yep - that was a special moment.

Sky: Doing God's work

PeterCS wrote:

Lindsay no.2 wrote: ...."to watch the Delhi Belly Daredevils versus the Bombay Sapphire Gin Palaces"

Noice.

I thought the thread was going to be a secular version of "Dear God in Heaven!". .... but then again, I suppose it is.

Close, but my Dear God in Heaven prayer is reserved for the Barmy Army's trumpeter/cornet player/whatever to one day be struck by lightning and explode into microscopic matter the moment he puts the instrument to his lips for a rendition of 'The Final Countdown/Great Escape theme tune/A.N. Other sing-along Butlins crowd pleaser tune'.

Billy Cooper is a genius.

When he struck up the Rocky Theme for Warner's entry after his stramash with Root, for example ... well, I laughed.

He has a decent repertoire, only falls back on the crap when he's bored by slow play and nothing happening. It's like a trumpeter's extended version of a raspberry.

The Root one was cute.

The rest of it I could do without.

Is this another potayto/potato subject for us Peter?

And he has to start off a chorus of "He bowls to the left..." when Mitchell Johnson has just reduced us to 50-7.

So, what do you fellows think about Sky? Seriously.

Lindsay no.2 wrote:The Root one was cute.

The rest of it I could do without.

I too have heard enough from Billy's zuluvulva.

furriner wrote:So, what do you fellows think about Sky?  Seriously.

The coverage on the whole is pretty good, and the amount of time they can dedicate to it is valuable for the established cricket fan who can afford it. But taking live cricket totally off free to air TV is cutting off its air supply in the long term, and there may come a point where it's too late to reverse the trend.

beamer wrote:

furriner wrote:So, what do you fellows think about Sky?  Seriously.

The coverage on the whole is pretty good, and the amount of time they can dedicate to it is valuable for the established cricket fan who can afford it. But taking live cricket totally off free to air TV is cutting off its air supply in the long term, and there may come a point where it's too late to reverse the trend.

Agree with beamer on the removal from free to air issue - the ECB went for the Sky package because of the money Sky chucked at them. Not a complete shock, everyone wants to fill their coffers and Sky is happy to pay over the odds to destroy its competition. But with a smaller audience able to watch it could help to make cricket a smaller game in the UK over the longer term.

Coverage in terms of the technical stuff is good - camerawork etc. I don't much care for the presentational style though - it's very American. Guys in suits and ties all excited about everything, all this reviewing and analysis baloney. Let's go to 3rd man and he's going to draw lots of lines and circles on the screen to prove a point about something. The Sky-Cart - wtf is that. I'd like a choc ice and two flake 99s please. All these so called innovations are just noise to me. I'd rather they got out of the way of the game, stopped with the incessant 'banter' and let the pictures do the work. But those days are gone,for good I guess.

Generally speaking, there's a considerable difference between maximising the interest for viewers - including possibly new and young viewers - on the one hand, and overhyping and ballyhooing to the point of - the opposite effect! - off-putting overblown vacuity, on the other. The former, overegged, spills into the latter.

I can see that it is good, desirable, perhaps essential to draw in the interest of new and/or easily-bored viewers as far as skill allows, alongside the fact that this task is a keyt part of (figuratively or literally) commercially "selling the package".

Bucketloads of graphics & animations; cameras, repeats and slo-mo (but back and forward up to a hundred times?) from all sorts of angles; closeups of shots, of hand positions, of points of interest, or of members of the public considered jolly; expert analysis (or not-so-expert analysis, if you are setting the sights lower, perhaps too low, for a LCD of dozy plebs); out-on-a-limb opinions, disagreements and controversies (real or fabricated),  may all be part of that. You can even conduct your own extended - or hyoerextended - unofficial DRS debates, not just with Hawkeye, snicko and hotspot, but wacko, Wankeye and wotnot.

All of that can certainly add to the attraction, absorption, understanding, entertainment of viewers. However, I think you've got to do that with care - judiciously, relevantly or wittily, with good personnel who know what they are doing (and avoiding surfeits of waffle and crap) - or you can easily flip from the good to the bad - see opening thought above.


Personally, I can do without cardiac-arrest commentary. If the match or match position or viewer (or indeed, listener) is so dead you need to wheel in the defibrillator at every opportunity, is the game really worth the candle?  I don't need artificial additives of passion, any more than I relish dense lashings of grotesquely biased patriotism, favoritism or nepotism (without humour).

Nor do I need stump mic volumes ramped up to surreal levels. It's good to hear from out there. But not horror-soundtrack type sound effects. The Blare Kitsch Project.

In short, FWIW, I fink SKY has added a lot of good innovation, but also a hell of a lot of noisy, extraneous, otiose gimmickry and .... often .... too much idle chatter. Let the pictures speak - help them with sound eloquence. Learn from Richie, which only a few do. Mikey is one of the best in that regard: taciturn when he doesn't have that much useful, enlightening or wryly waggish to add. Bumble is always droll, and gets the balance right when he's not faking it with Rupe-trademark ordained hysteria like the very worst of them. I love his accent, too.

I do snigger Mikey gets going on about over rates so unabashed.