Fields in Vision

Television Sport and Cultural Transformation

Garry Whannel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134938599
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Fields in Vision offers a comprehensive and analytical study of the international phenomenon of television sports coverage. Garry Whannel considers the historical development of sport on television, the growth of sponsorship and the way that television and sponsorship have re-shaped sport in the context of the enterprise culture.
Drawing on archival research, Whannel first charts the development of the BBC Outside Broadcast department, and the growing battle for dominance between BBC and ITV, showing how sponsorship and the rising power of sports agents began to transform sport - not only in the UK but across the world - in the 1960s. He goes on to examine the implications of this vast and escalating global network during the 1980s by analysing the central role that stars and narratives began to play in television sport, presenting case studies of major contests such as Coe versus Ovett and Decker versus Budd. His study also takes into account one of the more indirect, but no less significant results of international televised sport - the rise of popular fitness chic and the American monopoly of the workout boom of the 1980s.
Fields in Vision explains the development of television sport by linking its economic transformation with the cultural forms through which it is represented, offering a study encompassing not simply the sports world, but our relationship with television and the media industries as a whole.

Chapter 1

Sport, television and culture

‘The commercialisation of the Olympic Games will never be tolerated. They will remain the only sports event in the world where there is no advertising in the stadia or on the athletes’ vests.’

(Juan Antonio Samaranch, President of the
International Olympic Committee, 1981)

‘You paid $225 fucking million for these Games. You put on what the fuck you want, Roone. Don’t listen to that schmuck [Samaranch]. You do what you want. You paid the goddamn money.’

(Film producer David Wolper, talking to Roone Arledge,
President of ABC News and Sports;
quoted in Reich 1986:124)

At a sport event one day in 1986 I found myself sharing a lift on three separate occasions with, respectively, Sebastian Coe, Gina Lollobrigida and a tap dancer dressed as a moose. Over 1000 journalists and 55 camera crews were covering the event although there was no sport to be seen. It was the meeting of just 92 powerful people who comprise the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the major item on the agenda was the selection of a city to host the 1992 Olympic Games. It was the intense lobbying and campaigning that brought moose, Coe and Lollobrigida, along with the world’s press and hundreds of the most powerful and influential figures of world sport, to Lausanne, the headquarters of the IOC. As the Olympic movement has been transformed by the forces of television, sponsorship and globalisation, the vivid intensity of the tensions between tradition and modernity, amateurism and professionalism, and nationalism and individualism, has been plain to see. This book traces these tensions as they have been played out in British television and sport sponsorship, in the recent history of athletics, and in the Olympic Games and the World Cup.

What is so important about television sport that it warrants a whole book? There is a lot of it, over 2000 hours a year, not including the satellite channels; and while it’s not all wildly popular it is watched by significant numbers, and, on major occasions like the Cup Final or the Olympic Games, by as much as half the population. Television sport is by any standards a component of popular culture and to understand it better is to understand more about the culture in which we live.

In that it chooses particular sports and gives us a particular view of them, television must inevitably affect the ways in which we see and understand sports. Moreover, the coverage is not simply concerned with sport; it inevitably also continually makes implicit and explicit statements, in words and pictures, about our sense of nation, of class, of the place of men and women, our relation to other nations and so on. Think how many stock stereotypes of foreigners (temperamental Latins, happy-go-lucky West Indians, dull but efficient Germans, faceless factory-bred East Europeans) have unfolded partly around images of sport.

Second, television, in association with sponsorship, has been responsible for changing the face of sport in the last 25 years. You only need to think of the rise of snooker, one-day cricket, shirt advertising in football or the decision to stage the next World Cup in the USA. These changes are evident not only at the elite levels. Organisers of the smallest local competition or league now seem convinced that nothing can be accomplished without sponsorship. In a very real sense sport has become a branch of the advertising and public relations industries.

I like sport and it has given me some treasured memories—seeing golfer Harold Henning get a hole in one in 1963, Fulham beat Liverpool 2–0 at Craven Cottage in 1966, Crystal Palace clinch the Second Division Championship in 1979, Dave Moorcroft beat Sydney Maree over 3000m in 1982, and Ian Botham get his 355th and 356th Test wickets at the Oval to become the greatest taker of Test wickets of all time in 1986. I also like television sport and have many more golden memories as a result, but they’re probably similar to yours. One interesting effect of the vivid full-colour realism of television is that after a while you begin to be unsure about which events you saw in the flesh. Sport has also, increasingly, made me angry—sitting in crowds of people wearing cheap cardboard hats to advertise a building society, watching interminable award ceremonies staged for the benefit of sponsors, or watching cricket amongst sales executives so saturated with corporate hospitality they have difficulty focusing on the game. As this is a fairly dispassionate and analytic book, neither pleasure nor anger are given full rein—I am saving that indulgence for a subsequent project. I began studying television sport in 1978 as an embryonic PhD thesis, which I eventually finished in 1987. During this time both my children were born, both my parents died, Mrs Thatcher came to the throne, Fulham went down to the Third Division and Seb Coe, Alex Higgins, Martina Navratilova and Ian Botham all had their golden days.

While it’s possible to debate whether the changes wrought by television and sponsorship are good or bad, it’s more relevant to try and understand the conventions of television, how they emerged, and how television, as an economic reality and a set of aesthetic conventions, has intervened in and transformed the cultural practices of sports. That, in short, is the intention of this book.

QUESTIONS OF SPORT: THEORY AND ANALYSIS

The English Idea of Sport is such that the English do not like professional professorial discourses on sport.

(Conservative Minister for Education, 1958;
quoted in McIntosh 1952:281)

I am not sure how professorial or professional my discourse is, but one of its intentions is to examine and challenge this suggestion that sport should not be open to analysis. Sport occupies a major place in English cultural life. It provides many of the major national ritual occasions of public life; indeed, our concepts of nation and our concepts of sport are closely linked. Politicians have traditionally made extensive use of sporting metaphors: ‘keeping a straight bat’, ‘playing the game’, ‘all pulling together’, are phrases etched into the social and political fabric. Morality too draws upon concepts of fair play developed around ideologies of sport (see McIntosh 1979). This centrality is typified by the FA Cup Final, an event that manages to be a popular celebration with strong working-class roots, a shared national ritual and a constructed link between royalty and popular culture, all in one (see Masterman 1980, and Colley and Davies 1982).

Television has become central to the prominence of sport. Major sporting occasions draw enormous television audiences, sometimes over half the population. Television has in turn become a significant source of revenue for a variety of sports. More importantly, television coverage has opened the way to much larger earnings for sport in the form of sponsorship. In becoming central to the world of sport, television has also transformed that world. Relatively obscure sports have gained huge new followings. The popularity of show jumping, snooker and, to a degree, darts has been boosted dramatically. Conversely, sports with high participation rates (squash, angling, badminton) have been adversely affected by their apparent unsuitability for television. For most of us, for most of the time, sport is television sport.

For television itself, sport has become very important. At times of major events like the Olympic Games, it has a unique ability to win and hold large audiences even well outside normal peak viewing hours. To offer high-quality sport coverage has become important to the prestige of broadcasting organisations, as the battles over television rights to football demonstrate. And, despite the publicity given to the financial struggles over football contracts, sport as a whole is still a source of very cheap programming, compared with other programme forms.

Despite the centrality of television sport, and the growth of media studies and cultural studies in the last 15 years, until recently there has been little detailed analysis. The pioneering study of football edited by Edward Buscombe (1975) and other work in this era were heavily influenced by film theory, as was parallel work in France (Daney 1978, Telecine 1978), and concentrated on close textual analysis along with consideration of political and ideological signification (see also Peters 1976, Nowell-Smith 1978). The influence of Buscombe can also be detected in North America during the 1970s, alongside more traditional forms of content analysis (see Journal of Communication, summer 1977, special issue on media sport, and Real 1975). But further developments were slow and spasmodic (see Birrell and Loy 1979, Clarke and Clarke 1982, Whannel 1982, Bown 1981) and only in the last few years has the field been more thoroughly explored. Alongside Barnett’s (1990) study of British television sport, there is a range of North American studies (Rader 1984, Chandler 1988, Wenner 1989a, Cantelon and Gruneau 1988, Gruneau 1989, Real 1989), the rapid growth of cultural studies in Australia during the 1980s has spawned several studies of media sport (see Lawrence and Rowe 1987, Rowe and Lawrence 1989, Goldlust 1987), and Critcher (1987) has reviewed the emergent field.

I think there are three sets of questions to consider:

1 How are television’s representations of sport organised? What are the characteristic forms in which material is organised, and what cultural and ideological themes are in play?

2 What production practices and professional ideologies underlie such representations, and how, historically, were they formed? What was the institutional base for the formation of these practices, and what relationship could be seen between practices and texts?

3 What are the cultural and economic relations between television and sport, and how, if at all, has television transformed sport? What relationship is there between the cultural and economic level in this particular instance?

Texts and practices

During the 1970s work on the media was handicapped by the emergence of two distinct paradigms, which became artificially distanced by their separate theoretical bases. On the one hand, a rich tradition of text analysis drawing on the insights of structuralist analysis and semiology produced a reified view of the text as the privileged object of analysis from which everything else can be read (e.g. Heath and Skirrow 1977). On the other hand, an equally rich tradition of investigation of the structures and practices of television production tended to see programmes themselves as relatively unproblematic consequences of production practices, economic relations or the intentions of producers (e.g. Elliott 1972). The effects of this divergence have persisted and continue to mark media and cultural analysis in the postmodern era. Angela McRobbie has recently drawn attention to the way some New Times analysis has tended to celebrate consumption, whilst severing it from the context of social practices, whereas some neo-Marxist critiques of postmodern theory advocate a return to reductionist analysis (McRobbie 1991). David Morley warns of the need to steer between the dangers of an improper romanticism of consumer freedoms on the one hand and a paranoiac fantasy of global control on the other (Morley 1991). This study investigates texts, institutions and economic relations in order to see what relationships can be established between them. It attempts to avoid both the idealisation of texts, and the reduction of texts to a mere effect of their process of production.

The character of the institutions of media production, the economic relations within them, and the tendency towards concentration, integration and diversification have been well explored (e.g. Murdock and Golding 1974, 1977). But without an adequate methodology of content analysis and a sufficiently sophisticated model of the process of determination, this area of work always contained the danger of reducing programmes to a mere effect of the economic relations underpinning their production.

The elaboration of the encoding/decoding model (Hall 1973) promised to resolve some of these problems, in that it introduced the question of language and convention while retaining and offering a way of examining the question of determination. As Morley characterised it, the model posits a flow in the communication chain between a sender and a receiver, two points with their own structure, different and yet linked. Mechanisms or forms are needed to unify them, this being a complex, not a simple unity. The production of a meaningful message is always complex and contradictory; and the process of reading is complex—a range of readings is always possible. In short, the message is a structured polysemy, but with particular elements structured in dominance (Morley 1980).

In focusing on television representations I am drawing upon the encoding/decoding model of communications. But the need to conceptualise the relation between television and sport as both cultural and economic in turn raises questions about the use of this model. Stuart Hall’s elaboration of the model roots encoding and decoding in the frameworks of knowledge, relations of production and technical infrastructure in which each takes place. It thus allows a relation to be made between representations, and the production practices, professional ideologies and institutional structures that support and produce representations.

It has been argued that work that remains within a determinations problematic is on inherently unstable ground. The task of maintaining the two ends of the chain—relative autonomy, and determination in the last instance—is an ill defined one for which there is no adequate methodology. Consequently the analysis is always likely to drift either towards reductionism or towards an unacknowledged total autonomy of the cultural level. Coward argued that much work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was prone to a reductionist tendency, and was too class rooted, at the expense of the structuring effects of gender difference (Coward 1977). Chambers and others replied that the work of CCCS remained rooted in a determinations problematic, and, in rejecting some of the implications of psychoanalytic theories of the production of human subjectivity, warned of the dangers of unprincipled eclecticism (Chambers et al. 1977).

By contrast others criticised Hall, not for reductionism, but for neglect of the economic level. Murdock and Golding claim that, in Hall’s work, a brilliant analysis of the cultural sat upon an undeveloped analysis of the economic base, and they, and Garnham, both argued that Hall overemphasised the role of the state and underemphasised capitalist entrepreneurship (see Murdock and Golding 1977, and Garnham 1977 and 1979).

These were relevant criticisms, particularly in terms of sport. Much of Hall’s work on television was focused upon areas of news and current affairs. In this area of television it can be argued that, while the marketplace and economic relations do not play a central role, the state, via the statutory instruments governing broadcasting, and the consequent conventions of impartiality, neutrality, objectivity and balance, is crucial in establishing and constraining the formal conditions of the production of television journalism.

However, when one examines popular television, it is arguably the case that, while the role and effect of the state are somewhat less crucial, the significance of economic relations becomes considerably greater. The production of entertainment is both a cultural-ideological and an economic practice. While recognising the relative autonomy of the cultural level, it is vital also to identify all the ways in which the nature of the economic relations underpinning cultural production constantly sets limits and exerts pressures (R.Williams 1973).

Hall’s subsequent (1977) development of the encoding/decoding model expanded upon the role of the field of representations from which encodings are selected. More recently, Angela McRobbie (1991) has called for a return to integrative modes of analysis which track the social and ideological relations which prevail at every level between cultural production and consumption. This means examining all of those processes which accompany the production of meaning in culture, not just the end product. Following this, this book situates television sport in the context of the field of representations upon which it draws. It also examines the economic substructure of the relation between television and sport, as a determinant both upon the pro-televisual sporting event and upon the practices, ideologies, forms and content of television sport coverage itself.

Fields of struggle

Questions concerning the relation between television and sport focus on the problem of transformation, and draw upon debates about the cultural nature of sport itself. Critical analyses of sport have tended to a striking one-dimensionality (see Hoch 1972, Vinnai 1976, Brohm 1978). Sport has been characterised as a distraction, a new opium for the masses, a form of bread-and-circus, a position that tends to undervalue the force of sport as the site of a set of ideologies with their own effectivity. Ideological analyses of sport have tended to present it as an unmediated and uncontested form of dominant ideology, in which no meanings are contradictory, or the subject of struggle. More economistic analysis has suggested that sport is just another form of capitalist business. Clearly to some degree, and increasingly so since the sponsorship boom, this is true. Yet an important feature of the development of sport has been the tension between the amateur paternal benevolence of traditional sporting organisations and the rising power of capitalist entrepreneurship. Similarly, analyses that emphasise the relation between sport and the state, while of great interest, do not take sufficient account of the strong element of voluntarism in the formation and development of English sport. What many of these analyses lacked was a space for the rather complex relations between structures of control and lived sporting cultures. Only recently have developments in the history and sociology of sport begun to explore such complexities more fully.

Historians and sociologists traditionally ignored sport or regarded it as merely epiphenomenal. Only in the last decade has British sport history begun to develop at a more rapid pace (Mason 1980, Holt 1989, Jones 1986, 1989, Mangan 1981, Mangan and Park 1986, Mangan and Walvin 1987). Similarly, it’s only in the last ten years that Dunning’s (1971) collection of sport sociology has been significantly added to. The growth of cultural studies has provided an impetus (see Tomlinson 1981a, b) as has the work of the Leisure Studies Association, especially through the collections of papers from the international conferences in 1986 and 1990 (see also Horne, Jary and Tomlinson 1987).

Within this body of work some have emphasised the role played by class relations, gender relations, and the cultural and ideological field—a necessarily complex and contradictory one—through which such relations are re-worked (see Gruneau 1983, J.A.Hargreaves 1982, Clarke and Critcher 1985, and J.E.Hargreaves 1986). Critcher (1986) and Tomlinson...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Sport, television and culture
• Part I: Institutions, practices and economic relations
• Part II: Sport on television
• Part III: Cultural transformations
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index