I watched almost all of the SailGp held in Germany this weekend, and while there was pretty good breeze (low 30’s at times!)for most of it, the whole thing felt like an empty calorie soft drink with too much sugar and not enough fizz.
Yes, there were moments, yes the 2 flights get pretty scrambled, and yes, seemingly every boat at their moment(s) in the sun, and maybe it’s just me but the god damn broadcast is just so overwhelmingly annoying that it tends to serve as a cock-block against viewing the event as a whole.
I don’t know how many of you watch F1 – I suspect a ton of you do – but as an Apple TV subscriber, I am saddled with the non-stop blubbering of the young pomies who spend the majority of the broacast either hyperventilating, or talking over each other, often both at the same time. (Sadly, I can’t get the Sky TV boadcast with Crofty and Martin Brundle). Wrong as often as they are right, their Britt bias is as predictable as the totality of the broadcast.
For SailGP, “expert analysist” Stevie “Wonder” Morrison, (as in it’s a wonder he has a job behind the mic), puts those pasty F1 Pomes to shame. When it comes to yelling – which he does nearly the entire broadcast, speed of delivery that would put a meth head to shame, and observational gems like “The right thing is the right thing to do”, he is unmatched when it comes to What the Fuck am I listening to? I know he is an accomplished sailor, but bring it down a bit, bruh.
Todd Harris, a servicable “host”, but only for those who don’t know what that position actually requires. And of course, keeping in line with the proud mysoginistic sailboat racing broadcast tradition of rendering the token female to her station bouncing around on the water, and always put on the spot with things like “So, what’s going on out there?”. Just once I’d like to hear one of them say, “So just what in the fuck do you think is going on out here, genius? It’s wet and bumpy, I’m freezing my ass off, and there are lunatics going 50 mph in these missiles.”
Sorry, no room for you in the booth, luv.
And lastly during the entirity of the racing, there is the undercurrent of indecepherable radio traffic from the teams. Other than making the broadcast unneccesarily busy, it provides almost zero actual information. I first noticed it in the last America’s Cup, and was as useless there as it is here.
Can you imagine sitting in a programming meeting with all the geniuses who come up with this horseshit, and not saying, “You guys do understand how awful this sounds, don’t you? You’d be fired on the spot for daring to question their unmatched creativity. But what do I know? – tempesta.
