As ridiculous as it sounds, we need to talk urgently about the media production company IMG. It packages up English Premier League football for a one-hour highlights show screened every Monday evening by Fox Sports in Australia, and many other channels around the world.
Forgive me if some of the following facts sound a bit obvious. Premier League football is a highly popular international sporting attraction, one of the top selling points for pay TV in Australia, and it is far from cheap. Particularly at this time of year, once the clocks have changed, watching a lot of live matches from Europe is a challenge for viewers in the eastern states. So a neat little round-up of all the essential action on a Monday is a fine idea.
IMG have the job of producing this programme, which, you would think, would be a breeze for a company that boasts its production team has “the experience it takes to put on a show in front of the world’s largest audiences”. Here’s what you have to do: select the most attractive, important or surprising games (which is not that hard after they have taken place) for extended highlights, then add all the goals, near-misses and controversial incidents from the rest. That’s it. Plus maybe a very short clip of managers’ comments after the top games.
Yet this tried, trusted and simple formula has been persistently fiddled with and subverted until parts of the programme have become unwatchable and viewers this season have been left in alternating states of bewilderment and fury as they try to make sense of the weekend’s events.
Let’s start with the basics – which games deserve in-depth treatment? Possibly the ones with teams near the top of the table, or fighting relegation, local derbies, six-goal thrillers; ones with red cards, managerial hissy fits, goalkeeping howlers or dramatic endings. Or, you could stand firm against such temptations and simply go with all the games that are played on Sunday, such as this week’s compelling mid-table goalless draw between Swansea and West Ham.
Next, the surrounding material. How much do archive footage, interviews with random fans, the opinions of local newspaper journalists and pictures of the back pages of the British tabloids add to the coverage? My answer would be somewhere either side of zero. And how much time do they take away that might otherwise be used for showing, you know, football? Sometimes almost 10% of what is available.
Finally, advanced highlights packaging. Do viewers really want to get some idea of what happened on the field, or would they prefer if several games were selected for special treatment in which the footage is shown at variable speeds, through grainy filters for that flickering “archive feel”, with dizzying zooms, jumping between numerous angles within seconds or using the only camera in the ground that failed to adequately capture the relevant goal?
Clearly the latter won the day in IMG’s pre-season “thinking outside the box” brainstorming sessions. So this week we caught glimpses apparently filmed through binoculars of Luis Suárez’s hat-trick against West Brom, a game the commentator summed up as “a wonderful spectacle, capped by some breathtaking goals”. If only there was some way his attractive word-picture could have been brought to the screen.
So, to be clear. A football highlights package involves showing football highlights, using the advanced technology available to transmit clear pictures of the key events on the field. It is not a homemade music video uploaded to YouTube, or a powerful historical documentary, or an avant-garde French movie of the early 1960s starring Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo, or a primary school child’s experiment with using every available function on a popular piece of software they have just discovered.
Football. Highlights. You have them, IMG. We want them. Surely there is some kind of deal we can make here.
*http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNGiycRQzs3rz–0mOHj6q-mGhPh4w&url=http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/oct/29/premier-league-highlights-australia-football
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