TV heaven or TV hell?

Last updated : 03 March 2005 By Plug
First shown 'edited' 12th February 2005, Livi v Dundee Utd Matchday Magazine, piced £2.50 sold in and around the stadium.

A sight not often witnessed at Almondvale
When the ‘bigwigs’ of the Scottish Premier League turned down a multi million pound offer from SKY a few years back to instead concentrate on ‘SPL’ TV, they thought they were embarking down the road to riches where fans would pay big bucks and sign up in their thousands to witness a new age in Scottish Football.

We’re several years down the line now and I think it’s fair to say that things haven’t quite gone to plan. Irish based satellite broadcaster ‘Setanta TV’ now have the rights to show SPL games and while it can’t be denied that SPL games is what they show, the vast majority of the games they choose to show involves one half (or both) of the ‘Old Firm’ beating their opponents easily. Hardly a product likely to set the armchair fans pulse racing, is it?

Is it any wonder that ‘Setanta’ has struggled to pull in enough subscribers to allow it to comfortably predict that it will be able to furnish the SPL with the agreed payments as the contract continues? Remember that SKY gave ‘Setanta’ to public houses in Scotland because none of them were apparently willing to pay for their ‘product’.

It seems to me that by dismissing the SKY offer and deciding instead to embark into a ‘brave new world’ of self promotion, the SPL has shown itself to be incompetent in the extreme. They have handed the main vehicle for promoting the top league of our ‘National Game’ to people who, on the face of it, are not interested in the league or the continued advancement of the product on the park. People who don’t seem to care that showing one sided games week in week out is not only detrimental to the attendances at those games, but detrimental to the very viewing figures they so badly crave. Think about it, how many people do you know that subscribe? Not many, if any I’ll bet.

Why is it that Setanta seem unable to realize that to continually show the OF walking over the top of their rivals only puts people off? Surely even the most ‘diehard’ of armchair OF fans must be sick to their back teeth of watching their favourite’s gub teams in front of stadiums where even the home support hardly sells out week after week?

In fact the way that Scottish Football is portrayed across all the channels is very lopsided to the point of pandering to the OF and it just leaves me cold. Take ‘Scotsport’ for example (please, take it!), it’s more a comedy/variety show than a serious roundup of the previous weekends SPL action. Who cares if some player can keep ‘it up’ longer than the rest? Who cares how hard players can kick a ball into an empty net? Just about every week sees a signed Glasgow Celtic/Rangers strip as a prize in their phone in competition. On occasion they have even offered tickets for English games rather than Scottish games. Has no-one told them that to have ‘fans’ standing on a terracing in the studio, when everybody knows that there is no terracing in the SPL makes the show a laughing stock? Obviously not.

The BBC seem as blinkered as their satellite counterparts when it comes to the games they choose to show. Only recently they chose not to show the more evenly matched CIS Semi Final between Hearts and Motherwell at Easter Road, instead choosing what was obviously the lesser of the two contests, Rangers versus Dundee Utd. The only surprise on the night was that Rangers stopped scoring at seven! They’ve also commissioned another series of ‘Offside’, the cringe inducing so called ‘irreverent’ look at football north of the border. What did we do to deserve that?

That Livi are hardly ever on the telly shouldn’t matter to you if you follow the Lions every week ‘in the flesh’. Today sees Eddie Thomson bring his traveling ‘shoogly peg’ for Ian McCall to hang his jacket on inside the Almondvale dressing room. Let’s hope that Livi are sitting 1 point better of than the ‘Arabs’ and off the foot of the table at 5.45pm tonight. C’mon Livi!