WITH the Olympic games in the northern hemisphere, all Australians started with good intentions, setting the alarm for the key events in the first swimming-dominated week, a traditional area of strength for the big island. Getting up at 3am to watch Thorpe or Hackett or any of the bevy of Aussie neo-heroes now parting the water was not a strange activity for sensible working citizens. In the second week, where track and field took over and the race for gold should have receded, national production had a chance to return to normality. Unfortunately, at Athens Australia’s sustained success in the velodrome delayed this return to full productivity. Good results in baseball, rowing, shooting, hockey and the women’s basketball didn’t help either.

Channel Seven’s coverage was team-tagged with SBS in the way Pay TV has team-tagged Nine and Ten’s coverage of AFL. Seven took an ad break and the nation, as one, clicked over to SBS. Sorry, advertisers. In this era of remote control, your curly dollars were completely wasted. Between the two, consumers had brilliant wall-to-wall sport with the mainstream blockbusters on Seven and the obscure and beautiful on SBS – volleyball, handball, boxing, wrestling, water polo, badminton, table tennis and the rest.

In fact, Australians had few grounds for complaint for the free-to-air coverage of the Athens games. Americans, remember, were furious when they received a delayed broadcast of the Sydney games. We had the lot – live broadcasts for serious citizens and superb replays by Seven and SBS during the waking hours. And, in 2004, we were spared visuals of the commentators sitting at cramped desks on the edge of the venues with Mickey Mouse headphones and that pumped-up sense of media intimacy. We heard Bruce and the sport experts but didn’t see them. This was sports television as it should be – radio with images. The Seven producer should win a media award for catch-up brilliance. Not seeing talking heads enhances the authority of their calls, which is something ABC Cricket Radio has known forever.

Not being there

A FEW decades ago, when Adelaide resembled a European city-state, I gave notice at a factory job and moved into an inner city doss-house to attend an Adelaide Festival. Over three weeks, I attended 30 productions as well as free Writers Week performances and free art exhibitions. Two years later, I was running a business and every Adelaide Festival since has eluded me.

All festivals, including sporting ones, are more than a series of moments. They are working history, the interface between the past and the future, the culmination of planning, projection, rehearsal, dare. Festivals can be the moment of truth or they can fudge the truth. Ben Johnson and Peter Sellars, say. Things go wrong. A hurdler’s knee buckles. A rower falls back into the unwilling arms of a colleague. A play flops.

The significance of the moment can create reasons for a new history or a false history or a sense that history is an accumulation of tributaries, little creeks rather than raging rivers. Every festival tries to be the turning point in the history around its creation but few are. I think, now, that festivals are designed for the very young or the very old. People with time in their lives. The unready or the over-done. Looking at the young Australians in the Athens crowds, I wondered where their ticket money came from, where this time fitted in their CVs and how many of them realised they may never have the time or the cash to attend an Olympics again.

Playing the bill

OUR MOB in Bay 132 often discuss The Bill during the quiet moments of a game. This UK cop show is constructed like a football season with surges and dips, injuries and suspensions, false starts, long final campaigns. It is no surprise that many football fans treat The Bill and their team with the same credulous seriousness.
During a recent final series, Sunhill nearly lost the match by allowing the sleep-deprived DC Brandon Kane to be the exchange hostage for his two children in barking mad PC Cathy Fatal-Attraction Bradford’s time-out in the Boiler Room.

Allowing the Met’s support troops to approach the station with their sirens blaring was another mistake. This act was not clever football. The US police departments are always keen to announce their arrival but the UK, with its historical softly, softly approach seems to have switched their match plans.

Further, sending DSl Samantha Nixon and PC Honey Harman off to Cathy’s flat for some distanced profiling may have seemed clever at half time but it hardly helped the coaching panel at base make the right decisions in the final quarter. Superintendent Adam Okaro’s call for technical support was fine but why stick a microphone into the siege zone when, once the children were removed, a knockout gas would have brought an earlier end to proceedings even if it had scarred Cathy’s and Brandon’s lungs?

Sunhill has dropped the ball many times recently following the Internal Corruption, the Big Fire and the Big Suicide. This trifecta of disasters should have dragged each officer back to basics – an acceptance of the need for rigorous procedure and more believable television. Alas, the opposite is the case. Week after week, individual officers ignore the coach – acting without back-up, fudging evidence, verballing suspects. Sunhill, once, nearly always played it straight down the middle. These days, alas, there is at least one commissioned officer in Sunhill creating more crime than they solve in every episode. Kicking own goals is the UK expression. Alas, poor citizens.

The sound of silence

IT’S almost impossible to watch a game of football in silence. In the living room, rational people turn the sound down and insert their own commentary. “I’d like to see that again,” they say. Or “The coach will be well pleased with that passage of play.” At the ground, in every part of the crowd, there is at least one member of the secretariat calling the play or predicting the play or coaching the play. “Man up,” someone always screams. When players do abandon their zone defence (allowing receivers to form the huddle, run off from the group and easily clear the ball), I yell: “Never man up” and get an angry glare from a person two rows in front of me.

Sometimes parts of the secretariat form a useful service. Someone with binoculars will inform the rest of us that in the flurry of limbs at the remote end of the ground it was Lade or Welsh who jagged the goal. Or they’ll tell us that Williams has smashed the telephone or that Burton has an icepack on his knee. If they have their radio ears on, they’ll inform us that Howard has just announced the election or Kent Kingsley has been reported or there are violent ice storms in Sydney. Between the first and last siren, with all receptors on red alert, every piece of information about anything seems to be critically important.
Then there is private conversation – that constant murmur in the crowd during moments of non-crisis. Byron Pickett, for example, takes a mark and goes back for his kick at goal. “Aim three inches to the left,” the smart ones instruct. “Do it Choppy, do it Choppy” others chant in a childlike manner. The ball hits the post. The crowd goes aarhhh as if the bad gods had something to do with it. Next summer, in the Wizard Cup, they could trial two points for hitting the goal post (and call it an Aarrhh) and one minus point for hitting the point post. And call that an Awful.

Private conversation at the football can sometimes be difficult, especially between loved ones who are not supporting the same team. Once, I heard a man say to his partner: “The tide may be turning” after his team was six goals down and kicked a point. She said, flatly: “Shut up” and, sadly, he did. As his team clawed their way back into the contest over two long quarters and, in fact, won the game, he remained silent. Totally. Stoically.

I winced for the silent pain embedded in that victory.