P Fox: Innings closed but not all doom and gloom (27 Jun 1998)

27 June 1998

Sport on TV: Innings closed but not all doom and gloom

By Paul Fox

THIS has not been a good week for the BBC: Test match cricket looks like disappearing from their screens, the BBC's head of sport, Jonathan Martin, is taking an early bath and, to cap it all, BBC television prefer Wimbledon and Prime Minister's Questions to the World Cup. What is going on?

The World Cup v Wimbledon clash was a no-win situation for the BBC: Tim Henman on Centre Court on BBC1, Tony Blair facing Prime Minister's Questions on BBC2. Which one do you fade out for the football? If the answer to that one was relative easy, the other two situations are fiendishly difficult.

The England and Wales Cricket Board have won a victory of sorts. They persuaded first Lord Gordon's committee and now the Government that Test match cricket should no longer be one of the listed events. For Chris Smith, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, this is an outcome that will offend the majority. The only people delighted by this dropping of one of the crown jewels are cricket's establishment. They believe that, like the Premier League and the Rugby Football Union, a fairy godmother will arrive from Sky and deliver riches. Maybe.

But cricket - even Test cricket - is not an audience grabber and the reality is that if cricket goes to Sky it will become minority viewing. Even on the BBC, the audience figure is disappointing. The explanation is that we don't have a winning team. When did we last beat Australia in a Test series? 1987. When did we last beat the West Indies? 1969.

There is a quaint view emanating from Lord's that because the BBC pay £18 million a year for Match of the Day, they should pay a similar sum for Test matches.

The fallacy in this reasoning is that Match of the Day delivers audiences of five million throughout autumn, winter and spring. Test cricket - even live Test cricket - only beat that once last year: on that Sunday in June when England went on to beat Australia in the first Test at Edgbaston. The average audience for live Test cricket is below two million.

But though the audience may be small by television standards, it is a noisy and an influential one. Cricket followers will become irritated by this decision and the self-satisfied noises coming from Lord's will not help.

FOR all the pleasure gained from winning a long and hard-fought campaign, the ECB must realise that they have only two customers for their products: the BBC and Sky. And there are some within the BBC who will be secretly pleased that the issue of how much to pay for cricket has now gone away.

The instruction to fold the chequebook was among the first Sir Christopher Bland issued when he became chairman of the BBC. It was this edict that made Martin's life so difficult during the last 2.5 years. Bland was being realistic: in his view, only a licence fee set at £120 could help the BBC compete for the top sports attractions.

Even now, with a licence fee only slightly south of £100, the BBC are reluctant to spend more than 10 per cent of their annual income of more than £1 billion on sport. Their priority continues to be the news with millions - no one is sure how many - going to a 24-hour news channel that is unseen by the vast majority of the licence-paying public.

It was this imbalance, this lack of will to find the money needed for sport, that unsettled Martin. He had come into television when BBC Sport, under Peter Dimmock, was in the forefront of the BBC's challenge to all-comers. Producers in sport were the Grenadier Guards of the Corporation. That symbolism disappeared some time ago and Martin could not prevent an even greater emasculation: the merging of television sport with radio sport. To The Management consultants stalking the corridors of the BBC, it looked like a match made in heaven. At best, it is a marriage of convenience but the cracks are beginning to show.

But there is pleasure for Martin in two surprise interventions by Smith. The whole of the World Cup and the whole of the European Championship are added to the listed events. Some hard bargaining will be needed to bring this about but it does mean that even some of the qualifying matches for the World Cup, like last year's Italy v England game in Rome, will in future be seen by the majority audience on terrestrial television.

The Government has given way to cricket's pleas but its actions on football's most important championships are a blow for Rupert Murdoch and an unexpected bonus for those who fought for the listed events.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)