It's been a long time since I've watched anything apart from sport on commercial television and even when on-screen images are sports-dominant I'll almost certainly have the volume turned down with something else providing the soundtrack.
Cogitations concerning commercial television were a natural fit as I made my way around the morning walk on Melbourne Cup Day, because, after around nine-thirty this morning I'll have the big TV in the living room tuned to Channel Seven's Cup coverage.
Your television watching habits are shaped by all sorts of factors, and it's probably no surprise to learn that Hughesy ended up with a fairly strong bias towards the ABC rather than the commercial channels. After all, the ABC was where I got to see, among others, Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part, Not Only But Also, Monty Python, Aunty Jack, The Avengers, Callan and Minder.
While that's hardly surprising and a reasonably impressive line up, there are other factors that come into play.
It's not as if I've never watched non-sports content on commercial TV, but for much of my stay in Townsville our access to television was limited to two channels, the ABC and an entity called Telecasters North Queensland.
Now, in the current multi-digital channel landscape that's almost laughable, but it gets worse. With their monopoly of the commercial airwaves TNQ deliberately went for the bottom line rather than viewer interest, and even high-rating shows like The Sullivans were usually two or three years behind the capital cities.
In the middle of the World Series Cricket revolution, we weren't going to get any WSC coverage away from the news. Forget it. Wasn't going to happen.
As time went by there were other factors that limited Hughesy's TV watching, and as the media landscape morphed towards the environment we know today there were other factors that switched me away from commercial television sports coverage commentary.
For a start there was the Channel Nine monopoly on high profile sport that saw their coverage switching between Wimbledon and the 1985 Ashes Series. Never mind ideas like competition, buy the rights to everything and show as much as you feel like, safe in the knowledge that the tennis and cricket fans don't have any choice but to take up whatever you're inclined to offer.
Pay TV has undermined some of that, and the commercial TV environment seems to be a tad more competitive than it used to be, but old habits die hard. When I switched the TV to Channel Nine to catch the T20 game between Australia and Sri Lanka there, large as life was the Four Nations Rugby League fixture between Australia and England.
When that was over the cricket coverage kicked in from the start, repeating the same channel's practice a while back and ruling out the usual trick of watching it on the radio.
Which brings me to possibly my biggest gripe about the television industry, and it's not just limited to the sporting side of things, but the Channel Nine cricket and rugby league coverage is a leading example. For a while the fact that you could watch the whole summer of international cricket was enough to take my irritation away from the inanities that were coming out of the commentary box.
Possibly the major factor behind my interest in watching anything other than sport on TV is the increasingly obvious dominance of formulas in program content. With just about every series I’ve started to watch it has become fairly obvious that the producers are increasingly going for fairly obvious formulas.
In some cases, that’s fine. You could see where they were going with The Cook and The Chef or Poh’s Kitchen, for example. Formulaic, but matched with a couple of personalities that distract you from the formula, and devoid of the irritant factors that seem to be a major ingredient in the reality TV side of things, the James May factor in the Oz and James Wine Tour thingo.
Now, I understand that you need to be working to a formula when it comes to something like sports commentary. The splitting of roles between the bloke who calls the action and the expert commentator who offers more analytical insights is a fairly obvious way of going about things, and a bit of byplay in the commentary box adds a bit of extra interest.
The problem starts to set in when the byplay carries on along the same lines year after year. It didn't take too long before the Tony Greig vs Bill Lawry, Ian Chappell or anyone with an Australian accent got very old indeed, and when the same voice informed the hushed viewing audience that the large luminous object they were seeing in the night sky was the moon I decided that was, more or less, it.
I'm the first to admit that your mileage may well vary when it comes to ABC radio commentary, particularly when Kerry O'Keefe is concerned, but at least you have the constant uncertainty of where KOK's cultural cogitations are likely to head next and the ABC's habit of lining up a different overseas commentator for him to spark off every year.
Having spent the preceding couple of Saturdays with one eye on the coverage of the Spring Carnival, I'm aware that there's plenty of cliche and repetition on offer. It's fairly obvious you'll go from expert panel to market fluctuations to the mounting yard to the lead-up to the race, to the running, the aftermath, the analysis and something that'll take the viewer into the start of the same cycle for the next race.
After I've done the flying visit to the TAB to outlay the $30 on Hughesy's chosen box trifecta and saver quinella it'll be a case of back to base, the chicken into the oven and into racing mode for the rest of proceedings up to the Big One. There'll be a bottle of something with bubbles over lunch, possibly something else to follow through the afternoon and that'll be it till the same time next year.
And the trifecta? So You Think there's Precedence for an Americain Monaco Consul?
Stranger things have happened.
