Get A Life, Not A Subscription

The Sunday Age

Sunday December 5, 2004

Paul Connolly

Many, many years ago, when Dennis Lillee still had a full head of hair, my father warned me of a bleak future. "Kieran," he said, "there will come a time, not too long from now, when you'll have to pay to watch any decent sport on the box."

Though he mistook me for my brother (who looks like me in the same way Darren Lehmann looks like Audrey Hepburn), he was otherwise spookily prescient. What, with the recent revelation that channels Nine and Seven are unlikely to pick up next year's Ashes series all but handing the contest to pay TV on a platter, the future is fast arriving.

As was pointed out in this column recently, this would mean that only one in four Australians (none of whom, oddly, I seem to know) will get to see what could be the first competitive Ashes series in Michael Clarke's memory.

Having just sat through Australia's demolition of New Zealand on Nine (a series that had all the appeal of a snuff movie) this really hurts. Why couldn't Nine have sacrificed the soporific New Zealand series for the good one, the Ashes?

Well, obviously enough, it's because despite the so-called anti-siphoning laws, which seem as watertight as a Collins class submarine, pay TV's very charter is all about collecting carrots to dangle in front of our noses. After all, how many people would fork out for pay TV without the sport? Probably about 16, and half of them would do so only because they had misread the fine print.

As it stands, pay TV has secured the rights to virtually all overseas cricket series, meaning most Australian fans missed the sensational 2001 Tests against India. Add to that the Super 12 rugby competition (once handled abysmally by Seven) and the entire English Premier League package (the loss of SBS's EPL highlights show to pay TV still leaves me with a phantom itch every Monday at 7.30pm) and it has quite a collection.

Fortunately, it's not quite so bleak for AFL and NRL fans, who still have a handful of weekly games, including all the finals, free-to-air. But if you follow a team with as much appeal to commercial broadcasters as Ukrainian folk dancing, you could well go an entire season without ever seeing them on TV. The Western Bulldogs are hardly free-to-air regulars, while until this season's NRL finals, the North Queensland Cowboys had featured in just one game on Nine in nine years. Unless a Cowboys fan had pay TV he could well have picked a fight with his team's star player in a Townsville nightclub and not recognised him.

So where does all this leave the rest of us? Do we just hand over the cash, however much it hurts? In the long run, we'll probably have to, or else all we will be left with on free-to-air is Rex Hunt's fishing show and the Commonwealth Games, which surely even pay TV will never touch with a barge pole. But in the meantime, allow me to clutch at straws and suggest that not having pay TV isn't as catastrophic as it might seem.

For one thing, should the average sport fan get access to pay TV, he or she would simply watch too much of it. I know I would. And not only too much of the good stuff mentioned above - which would limit me to a few hours sleep a night, on weekends especially - but also the sludge used to fill the time in between.

I can just see it. Within a few weeks of signing on I'd be sitting down to watch three-hour stretches of British powerboating, two hours of Land Rover racing, and more meaningless golf tournaments than you ever imagined existed. And I'd be thinking this was perfectly normal and acceptable behaviour.

Which, of course, it isn't. "Yes, honey, I know your mother's funeral is today but it clashes with the Aussie lacrosse grand final on Foxtel and it seems wrong to pay for it and not watch it, right? Give her my best."

Just imagine what damage pay TV sport would do to your relationships (not to mention your waistline). I'm loathe to speculate, but if a common denominator can be found in the break-ups of Tom and Nicole, Ben and J-Lo, even The Poo and Delta, I can only assume addiction to televised sport played a significant role.

So let's celebrate the continued loss of free-to-air sport to pay TV. Let's take it as an opportunity to peel our hides off our couches, unfurl our palsied, pudgy bodies and stagger, blinking into the light, and back into the arms of our loved ones.

As Norm used to say: Life, be in it.

© 2004 The Sunday Age

Back to News Index | Back to Home