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    Fake commentating

    Mentioned by Cogito on the Peter Brackley thread, perhaps worth a separate discussion.

    I'm using "Fake" as a catch-all term for deceiving the radio/TV audience, or at least being less than clear about the exact circumstances. If the commentator is in a London studio and the game is in Brazil, that passes the Not-Fake test only if they don't pretend otherwise, but it's Fake if they start saying "energy-sapping conditions here in Rio", etc.

    Adding pretend-live commentary on a highlights package is another one: my local channel has had the Bundesliga coverage in English (sadly dumped this season), and they would say things like "Werner's made a good run" which immediately tells you that's where the pass is going. Or "Schmidt is coming on, can he make an impact?" - well obviously he will (i.e. did), that's why you're showing the substitution.

    The irritation factor is not so much the quality of the coverage, but that they think you're stupid. Like an e-mail from customer relations saying "Fuck off" with honeyed words ("Value your feedback" ...).

    Oh yeah, delayed track and field, that's another one. Yes, I know the steeplechase happened while we were at the shot put, I saw it in the background, even saw an athlete with a flag draped over her shoulders. So don't pretend we're crossing live. Grrr.

    #2
    As a minor aside - what's that, the little known golfer who is 17 shots back and hasn't appeared on camera once in this tournament is about to take a 73 foot putt? Will it or won't it? Tbf this is sometimes acknowledged by the commentators, but not always.

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      #3
      Some of these points expand upon those made by tee rex in the OP with some added notes:

      Like him, I would distinguish commentaries that were done live in a studio as the event was in progress from those dubbed on to film. For example, in the 1982 World Cup: I believe Alan Parry, Tony Gubba and Des Lynam all did their BBC commentaries 'live' from a Spanish studio while the matches were in progress and these would then be edited for the highlights. This is very different from the 'Football Focus' practice of Gubba coming into the studio on a Friday to dub commentary on to the midweek goals from the Wales/NI/ROI qualifiers that the Beeb did not deign to do live commentaries for.

      Fake crowd noise is very insulting to the viewer. It's the canned laughter of TV football.

      From the 80s: 'Ski Sunday' and 'Grand Prix' were I think done 'live' from a studio, although Vine was sometimes in a nearby studio because he'd be filmed on the slope for the intro. However, the famous one of a British or Japanese competitor falling after three seconds is suspiciously built-up. IIRC it was impossible for the starts to be live because there would already be a competitor halfway down the course, so if Vine was doing the latter live, he could not also be doing the starts live.

      I doubt that Ron Pickering's commentary on Bob Beamon in 1968 was live. Field events were often taped and filled into the lull between races, as noted in the OP. This is OK when forced by the fact that events are concurrent but extremely annoying if done to accommodate a promo, interview or waffle (I think this was a theme of the London 2012 threads)

      In the Olympics, I don't think Tony Gubba was actually in the weightlifting stadium.

      1986 Commonwealth: David Vine was presumably not in the bowls audience.

      This may all have changed by 2012 when the BBC would obviously have spent a lot more money to have commentary teams in the venues.
      Last edited by Satchmo Distel; 15-10-2018, 11:39.

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        #4
        That kind of commentary has always been standard in Germany*, so the English Bundesliga commentators are following that stylebook. It's actually not so much a deceit than a device to convey immediacy and to point viewers towards what they should watch out for.

        * At least on the Sportschau, which used to run an hour or so after the games had ended. The Sportstudio, which would come on at 10 pm or thereabouts, would have more past-tense commentary.

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          #5
          Originally posted by G-Man View Post
          It's actually not so much a deceit than a device to convey immediacy and to point viewers towards what they should watch out for.
          Depends how it's done. I also suspect that, even when the commentary is done live, "prophetic" events like subs are dubbed later and edited in. Even Motty would do this on MOTD. "That booking might cost him later" - inevitably followed by red card.

          Conversely, incorrect predictions are edited out. "That booking might cost him later" gets snipped if there's no red. It alters history to some degree, by magnifying or omitting 'live' events depending on what happens later.

          OTOH 70s football commentaries predict postmodernism, where the distinction between past, present and future time is blurred.
          Last edited by Satchmo Distel; 15-10-2018, 11:48.

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            #6
            Originally posted by Satchmo Distel View Post
            Depends how it's done. I also suspect that, even when the commentary is done live, "prophetic" events like subs are dubbed later and edited in. Even Motty would do this on MOTD. "That booking might cost him later" - inevitably followed by red card.
            I've noticed MOTD employing a more subtle device where, in a 10-minute highlight, an apparently random booking is shown without comment meaning, usually, that that player will receive a second yellow a minute or so later.

            And another thing. In live games is there a very slight picture delay in relation to the commentary? It's something I feel I've spotted on occasion when, for instance, the commentator is beginning to call the goal before the ball is actually in the net. Or perhaps my own reactions aren't what they were.

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              #7
              Famously (albeit in the RL community) the Wigan v Manly world club challenge in 1987 wasn't televised in the UK at the time, but to fill in a spare weekend when they had no highlights to show for their show Scrumdown (probably because it was Challenge Cup weekend and the BBC had all the rights), Yorkshire TV got John Helm and David Watkins to put a commentary over Australian TV's coverage of the game. This produced gems such as 'you can smell the tension', 'just wish I was out there playing John, you can't beat nights like tonight'.

              The Bundesliga highlights show mentioned above (if it's the same one that used to be on BT, and maybe still is) is really annoying for it, particularly when it's the same commentator for all of the games, most of which happened simultaneously.

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                #8
                Every single English commentator for Bundesliga matches is annoying.

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                  #9
                  The American ones are absolutely insufferable, which is how Murdoch wants them

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                    #10
                    Why would he? (genuine question, not intended to be contentious)

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                      #11
                      I'm surprised ursus hasn't mentioned the baseball re-creation, which sounded absolutely horrible and thankfully went away once the country had a scintilla of media savvy. Literally a guy reading the Western Union wire of play-by-play while thwacking various things to make unrealistic baseball noises, imitating baseball played at Shibe Park or the Polo Grounds, hundreds of miles away. Sometimes a few of the station staff would cheer or boo. Ronnie Raygun was supposedly very good at re-creations.

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                        #12
                        With jokers like this doing the commentary



                        Amor, Fox Sports appears to see its natural audience as being that for Fox News. For soccer, that means hyping Americans whenever they are on the pitch, and often when they are not.

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                          #13
                          Originally posted by Flynnie View Post
                          I'm surprised ursus hasn't mentioned the baseball re-creation, which sounded absolutely horrible and thankfully went away once the country had a scintilla of media savvy. Literally a guy reading the Western Union wire of play-by-play while thwacking various things to make unrealistic baseball noises, imitating baseball played at Shibe Park or the Polo Grounds, hundreds of miles away. Sometimes a few of the station staff would cheer or boo. Ronnie Raygun was supposedly very good at re-creations.
                          I remember reading somewhere about what such commentators did if the telegraph system was interrupted - mostly sudden torrential rain but sometimes bizarrely long sequences of consecutive foul balls.

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                            #14
                            Again slightly off topic, but I half remember that the very first, unbelievably hyped, "the Saturday night's highlights are back on the BBC" MOTD (after ITV had stolen them, and Des himself, for some awful early evening show) somehow managed the monumental cock up of both commentary and captions being out of sync with the action. This resulted in scores appearing in the top left corner before we'd even seen the goals being scored, amongst other cruelties. Won't someone think of Bob and Terry!

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                              #15
                              I had (still have, I think) one of those 'World Cup Greatest Goals' VHS tapes from years gone by, that clearly avoided falling foul of rights in that all original commentaries had been re-recorded. And mainly - if not entirely - by Jim Rosenthal. With the aid of some fairly basic sound production.

                              At some point, the producer must have suggested to Rosenthal that, to make the whole thing a little more authentic, he mix things up a bit. This then resulted in a cringeworthy aping of one of those South American commentators that does the whole 'GOAL-GOAL-GOAL-GOOOOALLL!!'-thang. The fact that it was so obviously Rosenthal behind the fake-telephone-line commentary created huge mirth - that section of the tape frequently replayed by me and my cousin.

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                                #16
                                Originally posted by Southport Zeb View Post
                                I remember reading somewhere about what such commentators did if the telegraph system was interrupted - mostly sudden torrential rain but sometimes bizarrely long sequences of consecutive foul balls.
                                I was thinking the same thing SZ, so I suspect that means you too might have read Bill Bryson...? If my memory serves me right, there's a bit near the start of his first book The Lost Continent that talks about how back in the '50s or thereabouts his dad used to do remote commentary in just this fashion, pretending to be live at the stadium all the while, with the aid of some truly heroic dissembling in exactly the way you describe whenever the wires went down.

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                                  #17
                                  Originally posted by Various Artist View Post
                                  I was thinking the same thing SZ, so I suspect that means you too might have read Bill Bryson...? If my memory serves me right, there's a bit near the start of his first book The Lost Continent that talks about how back in the '50s or thereabouts his dad used to do remote commentary in just this fashion, pretending to be live at the stadium all the while, with the aid of some truly heroic dissembling in exactly the way you describe whenever the wires went down.
                                  I read that years ago so it's almost certainly where I read it.

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                                    #18
                                    Heh, found it – though it's in fact just over halfway through the book, and not quite how I remembered. It's also a combination of Bryson's own reminiscences plus the equivalent actions of not his father but another man his mother knew in Des Moines when she was young:

                                    Many American radio stations, particularly out in the hinterland, are ridiculously small and cheap. I know this for a fact because when I was a teenager I used to help out at KCBC in Des Moines. KCBC had the contract to broadcast the Iowa Oaks professional baseball games, but it was too cheap to send its sportscaster, a nice young guy named Steve Shannon, on the road with the team. So whenever the Oaks were in Denver or Oklahoma City or wherever, Shannon and I would go out to the KCBC studio – really just a tin hut standing beside a tall transmitter tower in a farmer's field somewhere south-east of Des Moines – and he would broadcast from there as if he were in Omaha. It was bizarre. Every couple of innings someone at the ballpark would call me on the phone and give me a bare summary of the game, which I would scribble into a scorebook and pass to Shannon, and on the basis of this he would give a two-hour broadcast.

                                    It was a remarkable experience to sit there in a windowless hut on a steaming August night listening to the crickets outside and watching a man talking into a microphone and saying things like, "Well, it's a cool evening here in Omaha, with a light breeze blowing in off the Missouri River. There's a special guest in the crowd tonight, Governor Warren T. Legless, who I can see sitting with his pretty young wife Bobbie Rae, in a box seat just below us here in the press-box." Shannon was a genius at this sort of thing. I remember one time the phone call from the ballpark didn't come through – the guy at the other end had gotten locked in a toilet or something – and Shannon didn't have anything to tell the listeners. So he delayed the game with a sudden downpour, having only a moment before said it was a beautiful cloudless evening, and played music while he called the ballpark and begged somebody there to let him know what was going on. Funnily enough, I later read that the exact same thing had happened to Ronald Reagan when he was a young sports-caster in Des Moines. Reagan responded by having the batter do a highly improbable thing – hit foul balls one after the other for over half an hour – while pretending that there was nothing implausible about it, which when you think about it is kind of how he ran the country as President.

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                                      #19
                                      Bryson was a teenager in the late '60s, so there might be some poetic licence there. Did American radio stations really still do that?

                                      Sounds like Dempsey-Tunney, 1927.

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                                        #20
                                        Into the 50s, definitely and could have been a thing in minor league markets in the 60s.

                                        This is from Ventura, California in the 50s

                                        However, the night we played Modesto, everything went wrong, worse than Earnest Thayer’s poem, “Casey at the Bat.” About three innings into the game, Harry rushed into master control, shaking his head. “I don’t know what’s going on up there, but something’s weird.” He handed me the script he’d just typed. “Look, at this, Jim.” I did. Modesto had had FOUR outs, retired its side, and then come right back up to bat again. “This is crazy,” said Harry.

                                        Our confused sportscaster wasn’t sure what to do. He began sweating, adlibbing about the weather, the crowd, the players, the crowd, his kids, the crowd, his WW II experiences, and making up stories about the ballpark’s peanut vendors or arguments or fights in the stands, anything to kill time. He was desperate. There he was with an open microphone, and a telegrapher’s script that didn’t make since.

                                        There was always the ploy he had used before: “The grounds keepers need to drag the field,” or, “it’s suddenly raining here,” or “the stadium lighting has gone out,” or “we’re getting a dust storm, so back to the studio for some music.”

                                        I filled with music while Harry hurriedly phoned the press box in Modesto. The phone rang and rang before the telegrapher answered with hiccups and slurred speech. He was drunk.

                                        Harry was suddenly faced with getting information (begging is a better word) from a reporter covering the game for the Modesto Bee newspaper. Working hurriedly, Harry typed a new cue sheet, picking up action prior to where Modesto supposedly had “four outs.”

                                        After about 20 minutes of music, we returned to the re-creation and eventually finished the broadcast. Don’t ask me who won, because I don’t remember. But the Modesto telegrapher got fired. It was a terrible evening. Now, over 50 years later, it comes back as one of the most memorable events of my long career in small-town radio. However, it may have been the night I took up drinking. I know the sportscaster did.

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                                          #21
                                          Wonderful.

                                          A couple of years ago I found this under-appreciated book in the library, a short history of sport on the radio. There's a section on Brazilian football, outlining the same challenges as baseball in the states: huge country, early technology. In short: they often made it up, and hilarity (sackings) ensued.

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                                            #22
                                            As someone who did a bit of commentary at uni, I am going to try to find that

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                                              #23
                                              Bryson grew up in Des Moines, the capital of Iowa.

                                              From the time he was seven until the time he was ten, Des Moines was home to the Demons, a Phillies farm team in the Three I League (Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa). I can’t prove that the Demons did recreations, but they are exactly the kind of club that might have during that period.

                                              One thing to keep in mind is that since the early days of broadcasting here, teams would sell their rights to a single station or network that would broadcast games both home and away. There were therefore usually two different sets of announcers covering every contest (and three if there was national or regional coverage). As the Ventura example shows, teams would resort to recreations for away games rather than send a crew to a relatively far flung outpost like Green Bay for several days (the Green Bay Bluejays finished second to the Demons in 1959, before beating Des Moines in the playoffs).
                                              Last edited by ursus arctos; 18-10-2018, 02:29.

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                                                #24
                                                Originally posted by tee rex View Post

                                                I'm using "Fake" as a catch-all term for deceiving the radio/TV audience, or at least being less than clear about the exact circumstances. If the commentator is in a London studio and the game is in Brazil, that passes the Not-Fake test only if they don't pretend otherwise, but it's Fake if they start saying "energy-sapping conditions here in Rio", etc.
                                                A friend of mine does these sort of commentaries, and says that the trick is not to admit you're in a studio, but neither to claim outright or even insinuate that you might be in the stadium.

                                                Comment


                                                  #25
                                                  Originally posted by tee rex View Post
                                                  A couple of years ago I found this under-appreciated book in the library, a short history of sport on the radio. There's a section on Brazilian football, outlining the same challenges as baseball in the states: huge country, early technology. In short: they often made it up, and hilarity (sackings) ensued.
                                                  Nice one tee rex, I've just looked it up and found there's a bunch of copies for £2.80 or so on eBay here in Britain so have snapped one up.

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