TV/Specials

Lessons learned

June 17, 2013

For a lot of football fans from outside the UK today seemed like just another day in the game, with stories about Liverpool buying expensive attackers filling the gossip columns and Joe Kinnear unable to get through a sentence without embarrassing himself. However, for those who’ve grown up as citizens of the great land that invented the glorious game in the first place it was a rather darker day of reflection and sadness, as one of the most iconic names in football commentary has been exposed as something to be ashamed of rather than anything to celebrate. For more than [...]

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Bells, whistles, yawns.

December 17, 2012

What I don’t get, right, and I’ll tell you for free, is how the bloody cyclists keep winning the Sports Personality of the Year when the British sporting public think of a bike as a mode of transportation rather than a competitive vehicle for racing. I mean, one of the main reasons the drunk bloke with the sideys got so much praise was down to him doing a sport no-one really gives a toss about, which apparently makes it harder (no idea why), and then I read that three of the last five SPOTY-faced winners have been peddlers. Now, you’d [...]

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SPOTY 2012

November 28, 2012

In terms of the misnaming of events few organisations have come up with a gem to match the BBC’s ‘Sports Personality of the Year’, which from this point on will be referred to using the execrable acronym SPOTY rather than me dissolving into tears of mirth every time it comes up. Just to really hammer the point home there was once a time Ryan Giggs won the award ahead of Jenson Button, something most people considered a sporting travesty, but if you think for a second about comparing the personality of a likeable racing driver and a serial cheater with [...]

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Paralympic Perfection

September 9, 2012
Alex Zanardi

Well, this evening I’ll be enjoying hat a la mode for my dinner, as after having talked down the potential audience for the London 2012 Paralympic Games the public have gone out to prove me wrong. Actually, I severely doubt that my scepticism has had any effect on the overall Paralympic ticket sales at all, but I can at least claim to have been as wrong as the bastard offspring of Piers Morgan and Carol Thatcher, if not as scary. On the other hand, I basically beat all the bigger writers to the punch in pointing ouot that Paralympic or [...]

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The Paralympic Problem

August 27, 2012
Paralympic basketball

I’m not the biggest fan of the Paralympic Games, in all honesty. A maladjusted childhood combined with a love of South Park and other such comedy means I find some events more funny than I should, and experience the simultaneous rush of guilt and joy that can be so confusing. If you haven’t clicked away in disgust by now, I thank you, as this is not a piece designed to mock the incredible athletes at the Games. Despite some rather overblown advertising and the news that pretty much all the tickets are sold now, this event will not come close [...]

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The BBC Olympics

August 11, 2012
John Inverdale

We’ve had a pretty good couple of weeks at the London Olympics, with medals galore and Usain Bolt, but there has also been the dark side, Jake Humphrey out of his depth at the velodrome, CBBC’s finest rocking the screen and the terrible spectre of John Inverdale’s hairspray budget, a crushing burden on the taxpayer. All in all, the BBC will take a lot of credit for the excellent coverage they’ve provided of the Games, a matter of national pride in many ways, so I thought I’d capture the zeitgeist and stick the boot in. The post-race interview technique was [...]

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