Low cloud swept in yesterday and engulfed the view from the BBC’s glass-backed, spa-style punditry niche — to the point, in fact, where one began to wonder darkly whether that green hill over Alan Hansen’s shoulder might actually be Glastonbury. Looking forward to Stevie Wonder on Sunday night, if that’s the case.
Meanwhile, raindrops the size of soup tins were falling on Portugal versus North Korea, handing the producers of the television coverage from South Africa the conditions of which they have surely lain awake at night dreaming: rain and Cristiano Ronaldo, coming together in a gorgeous intertwining of nearly limitless, viewer-teasing, slo-mo possibilities.
And so it came to pass, in replay after obsessively magnified replay. See how the droplets fly from the Portuguese show pony’s earlobes and product-stiffened hair! Look again at the fine mist of spray as the downpour breaks against his manly football shirt!
Anyone briefly passing through your sitting room yesterday would have assumed this tournament was taking place in zero gravity. Either that or that you were mysteriously engaged by a 90-minute perfume commercial.
But it’s not just Ronaldo. For those of us at home, this whole tournament has been sludgy with repetition. Even Switzerland, the World Cup’s most boring side, get screened like a wonder of nature captured in the raw by the National Geographic Channel.
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And yet nearly everyone in the commentary boxes is being very polite about it. This could be because commentators and summarisers know on which side their bread is buttered and the present arrangements suit them well enough. After all, if you show an incident slowly enough, and often enough, the odds are that even Craig Burley will eventually be able to work out what’s going on.
Thus far, only Mark Lawrenson on the BBC has broken ranks. He did so early doors, to his credit, spotting which way this was all heading as long ago as Japan versus Cameroon on the first Monday. “There was no foul there,” the dependable Guy Mowbray said.
“No. Just 42 replays,” Lawro added. He was at it again, during Brazil versus Ivory Coast. “Show that another 47 times,” Lawro jeered. “That’d be great, wouldn’t it?”
Of course, at the level of etiquette, deriding the host broadcaster’s production is a bit like spitting in the peanuts. But someone has got to do it and it might as well be Lawro.
Still, we should bear in mind that in some competing countries these pictures may not even be getting shown once, let alone 47 times and at three frames per second.
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Take the highly restrictive state of North Korea, for instance, where, as Simon Brotherton, the BBC commentator, pointed out, there is little in the way of daytime television and screenings of matches are routinely held over — perhaps even indefinitely in the case of matches in which, as yesterday, North Korea take a 7-0 thumping at the hands of a bunch of tattoo-embossed capitalists in a film that cannot be reworked to the glory of the Government, even with extremely careful editing.
Obviously, this is an appalling way to run a country, in a great number of respects. On the other hand, one has to ask: from England’s point of view, might it be an approach with something to offer?
If England versus Algeria, for example, had never been shown, North Korea-style, a lot of people would have been spared a lot of grief.
Maybe the Government can still step in. Record tomorrow afternoon’s final group game against Slovenia under blackout conditions. If it works out, send over the tapes some time on Thursday and shove it on shortly after The One Show. If not, don’t bother — just expunge it from the official history and leave the team in the sea. Yes, truth would be a casualty. But a lot of people in England would probably sign up for that quite happily, as things stand.