TV3 winning the rights ball game
There was the usual call for more of this kind of thing — from this quarter as loudly as anywhere else — but those calls were overtaken by another development later in the week, when TV3 confirmed it had beaten RTÉ to the rights to the Six Nations Championship.
RTÉ Head of Sport Ryle Nugent looked deeply unhappy, unsurprisingly enough, when confirming same on the main evening news, saying RTÉ had done its best but come up short.
It was the kind of news that tends to generate a lot of questions.
For instance, TV3’s ability to outbid RTÉ for such a prize has wrinkled many foreheads: it only seems like yesterday that the forecasts for TV3 were unremittingly gloomy, yet now it’s beaten the State broadcaster to the tape not just for the once-every-four-years rugbyfest, but for the annual festival. How is it able to afford to do that? Will it stop with the Six Nations? What does TV3 have in its sights now?
The questions are very different for RTÉ. For instance, much of the commentary in the past week about the broadcast rights didn’t mention a couple of other expensive ventures RTÉ has on its plate over the next twelve months — the Olympics, for instance, not to mention the European Football Championships, which the national team are still trying to make. Throw in a general election, which a public service broadcaster is obliged to cover in minute detail, and the costs begin to mount up. And up.
All of which is not to run interference on RTÉ’s behalf because it missed out on the Six Nations. As a person pointed out to me over the weekend, John Feehan, head of the Six Nations, wasn’t peppered with questions by David McCullagh about the decision in the same way that Paraic Duffy was when the GAA awarded games to Sky last year.
But it shows that the game has shifted not only in terms of TV3’s competitiveness, but regarding RTÉ’s dealings with other sports. When the GAA, for instance, sits down to negotiate its next deal with RTÉ, then the men from Croke Park are likely to point out that not paying for Six Nations coverage means the broadcaster should have more money to offer as their deal is hammered out. That, of course, holds true for other areas as well: perhaps there’ll be more of those All-Ireland final documentaries made as a result.
To give you some context, I spoke to Ryle Nugent a couple of years ago for my book GAAconomics. He was engaged and articulate on the matter of broadcast rights, and he made a couple of points then that seem very prescient now: “rightly or wrongly RTÉ is lined up in direct comparison with the likes of the BBC, ITV and Sky.
“I have no problem with that, I think those comparisons have driven a lot of what’s good about RTÉ sport because you have those benchmarks there to drive us to be as good as we can be despite having only a fraction of the staff and finance those organisations have.
“The flip side is that we’re not Sky because we’re not a sports channel. People forget that very quickly. We’re not a BBC or ITV because you’re talking about a population of 60 million compared to a population here of 4.5 million.
“The BBC licence fee is monumental in comparison to RTÉ’s, you’re talking £3.6 billion versus €183.6m in 2011 ... Would we be arrogant enough to think we have a God-given right to get the audience to join us? Absolutely not. We have to fight for that like everybody else.
“Don’t forget there’s huge choice here in a tiny market, very little if anything is now truly exclusive — BBC, ITV, Sky, TV3, Setanta, TG4, ESPN. That’s very competitive.”
It is. And getting more competitive all the time.
Fans united by La Marseillaise
At the time of writing details were still spilling out about the savagery in Paris last Friday night, details that ranged from the familiar missteps on Twitter — tone-deaf incongruities, ham-fisted expression, mistakes — to the gradual assembly of facts about the horror that befell the French capital.
Some of the most striking images were from the France-Germany game that was played the same evening in the Stade de France. The sound of explosives being detonated was audible as the game progressed, but that was superceded by the surreal sight of spectators wandering the pitch after the game ended, clearly unsure whether they should stay in the relative safety of a well-policed stadium or venture out into the unknown.
Perhaps one of the most potent images from that game and its aftermath was the grainy, hand-held footage of supporters waiting to be evacuated in a tunnel, and their sudden burst of singing. Not just any song, either, but La Marseillaise.
It remains not just every sports fan’s second-favourite anthem, after their own, but the song that a country adopted to underline its move, a couple of centuries ago, away from rank superstition and outmoded ideology, from the tyranny that one stratum of society can impose.
It still stands against that.
Chemical hysteria reaches a new high
Ah, the hysteria in the British media last week about Russian athletes doping.
Excessive? All this talk about the London Olympics a few years ago being ‘sabotaged’ by the dastardly Russkis and their State-sanctioned doping seems over the top, particularly when you consider the medals table.
For all their chemical wonders, the Russian Federation only made it to number four in London’s Olympic table. One space above them, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, so doping doesn’t even get you past the purest of the pure.
What other conclusion can you draw?
Barry bags another accolade
Heartiest congratulations to Kevin Barry, once of this parish, on winning the Goldsmith Prize for fiction last week for his novel, Beatlebone (Barry is also jointly responsible for one of the funniest things I’ve ever read, an interview with Tommy Tiernan in the literary journal, Winter Pages, which also came to my attention last week. Unfortunately my admiration comes with no prize cheque in sterling).
I spoke to Kevin a couple of years ago for a piece and opened by asking if he had any interest in sport.
“Well, yes, my family are old sword-fighting stock.”
“Really?”
“Nah, not really.”
