ITVs "The Conference" (The Premiership)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	The Premiership
Date:	19/09/01 (98 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Football, Ally McCoist

Disadvantages: Everything else

In a fit of rage normally associated with when someone tries to take money away from me, I sit and stare at the telly. Once more, money has triumphed over quality and we, the viewers, have no say in the matter.

What is this that has brought the rage upon the normally placid and laid back Duke? Well, it’s ITV’s The Premiership. ITV have never been renowned for their football coverage, and when I heard that, once again, Auntie Beeb had lost yet another sport (and not just any sport – they managed to lose the most popular sport in the world!) I resigned myself to some second rate football coverage come the new season.

So, here we are in the new season, and I have three weeks of The Premiership under my belt. Each Saturday night, at approximately 20:15 o’clock, I cry into my cup of tea as I’ve wasted yet another 75 minutes of my life watching really bad TV.

For those of you yet to experience the delights of The Premiership, let me point out the good and bad points as I see them.

Bad Points:

Too many adverts – maybe there aren’t, and there are the same amount of adverts in a normal hours worth of telly, but when watching this, it seems there’s an advert break every 5 minutes.

Not enough in depth football – despite having “featured” matches a la Match of the Day (MOTD), you’ll be lucky to get 5 minutes of a match. MOTD featured matches could be 15 minutes long, giving you a better overview of the game. One of these weeks, I’m going to see exactly how much football there is, but I don’t think it’s a lot. In a 75-minute programme, you have to allow around 20 minutes for adverts, and I would imagine around the same again for analysis of the matches, plus 10 minutes of gimmicks from El Tel and Andy in his van. This leaves around 25 – 30 minutes approximately of football.

Pointless gimmicks – the age-old favourite!
In the absence of real quality, bung in a few technical gizmos to disguise the crap. Both Terry V, and Andy T both have useless contraptions which add nothing to the programme, or analysis in my humble opinion. I bet when the ITV Sport directors were at school, their essays were always crap, but had nice colourful pictures to go along with them…

Terry Venables – who, in the name of someone, let this man on our screens during primetime Saturday night? While he may well have been England manager once upon a time, but he is simply not a good football pundit.

Andy Townsend – do I really have to explain about this clown? 30 seconds chatting to some football player in a truck in the car park of a Premiership football ground pointing out the obvious is not really good television. Some people shouldn’t be on the telly, and along with myself, I would have to include Andy.

Undecided Points:

The theme tune – U2 are not a bad band, and “Beautiful Day” is a decent enough tune, but while the BBC’s use of music is always brilliant – even the background instrumentals they use for the goals roundups etc. is sheer quality (and I will never ever forget the music used for the 1986 World Cup). ITV seem to make everything brash and in-your-face and so it is with U2.

Des – Still the same old Des we remember from the BBC, but something’s different… Does ITV Sport suck the life out of all it’s presenters? It would help if we could cut out the cheesy “interplay” between Des and Terry because I suspect I’m not the only one crying into their mug of tea as a result.

Good Points:

I like the time it’s on at. If I’m heading out on a Saturday night, it’s not usually until at least 8:30pm (20:30 o’clock in Dooyoo land) so I can shower earlier, and settle down to watch the adverts, I mean footy, before I go out.
r>Ally McCoist – head and shoulders above the other pundits around him on the programme. He provides good analysis, and a touch of humour (non-cheesy) to the proceedings, and wouldn’t look out of place alongside Alan Hansen in a MOTD programme. One minor point is that he’s not given enough time to show his football knowledge.

Ooops! Only two positive aspects of this programme!

OK, that’s my ranting over. How could we go about improving the programme? Well, less advertising breaks for a start – perhaps increase the length of advert breaks so that one or two could be missed out? This way, the flow of the programme is a lot smoother without being jagged due to the shows stop/start nature.

Lose Andy. Sorry Andy, but you bring nothing to the show, and people would rather see an extra 5 minutes of football rather than you interview some Z list footballer like Phil Stamp (or someone) being interviewed in your Transit.

Get rid of Venables as well – surely there’s someone out there who has a better TV personality than Terry? Anyone? Go on… please?

Let’s face it – MOTD had one thing that The Premiership will never have, and that’s pedigree. The BBC have had years to make minor tweaks to MOTD to produce a simple, yet exceedingly effective sports programme, and by concentrating on it’s strongest points i.e. the pundits, everyone watching gets what they want. The problem is that the BBC are very capable of putting out top quality sports action, but refuse to pay the money for the privilege, and we all suffer – the BBC no longer have a guaranteed ratings winner, and we have to watch that tripe on ITV (a channel that we rarely watch in our house anyway due to Sky Digital).

I’ve put together what I would consider to be a better template for the programme – notice the extra long advert breaks (5 minutes apiece) which enables ITV to cut out o
ne advert break (assuming advert breaks of approximately 3 minutes) and still have the same amount of advert time. Thus, the flow of the programme is a lot better, keeping people interested. This also has increased football exposure, with the two featured matches getting 20 and 15 minutes respectively as well as a generous 15-minute round up of the goals/highlights of the day.

19:00 Intro. Des is witty and introduces pundits.
19:05 First match – good coverage of top match.
19:20 Analysis of first match.
19:25 First Ad break.
19:30 Welcome back and second match highlights.
19:45 Analysis of second match.
19:50 Second Advert break.
19:55 Welcome back and goals round up.
20:10 Wind down to the end of the programme.

All in all, a far better effort than ITV currently put out, and I’m not even a TV executive! This is great – it’s just like “Changing Rooms”, innit? Only without that Llewellyn-Bowen character flouncing around in his frilly shirts, and telly programmes instead of rooms…

(1 star - gets an extra star cos there's footy in it)