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 The Big (Olympics) Picture: TV coverage raises dander Down Under
Saturday, September 23, 2000
From Latrobe Valley to Newcastle, television viewers are hacked about the Olympics coverage: too much jingoistic fluff, too little international flavor, too fractured.
Alas, this isn't the complaint of Western Pennsylvanians in particular or Americans as a whole. This isn't about NBC.
Such ire, rather, comes from Down Under.
G'day, Australia. Welcome to the coverage of the channel simply called Seven.
The Australian network refers to its coverage as "Olympics Live." It could learn a valuable lesson from NBC about using that four-letter word in relation to broadcasting the Summer Games. Then Seven went out and bumbled with its home audience, missing the start of a gold-medal swimming race Tuesday by Australia's own Susie O'Neill, a.k.a. Madame Butterfly and the nation's second-favorite athlete behind Ian Thorpe. The network also showed a home-grown's gold-medal shooting performance on tape and missed two goals by the Hockeyroos.
In a sports-mad country addressing its teams by nicknames such as Opals, Kookaburras and Boomers and watching these Summer Games at a remarkable 70-rating percentage, a broadcaster just shouldn't commit such heinous acts. "Poor show," wrote The Canberra Times.
Seven's Olympics director Harold Anderson reacted angrily in The Australian today: "I think that because these Games are going so brilliantly, I don't think journalists have got enough to write about and I'm sure that if, God forbid, there was an incident in the Games they would be happily diverted." Blame the messenger. How American.
Yet even the Kiwis are hacked. New Zealand is to Australia what New Jersey is to America -- the butt of jokes. So it rankled the island folks to the east when a popular Aussie radio duo, Rampaging Roy Slaven and HG Nelson's The Dream, made a touchy joke on their two-hour nightly Olympics show on Seven. Roy claimed to know the Kiwis' team secrets: "Don't think like a New Zealander, deny you're a New Zealander and don't swim on a full stomach." That struck such a chord that the New Zealand Herald responded with a front-page story.
Yet the late-night show is such a hit in Australia, native son Michael Klim was seen clinging The Dream's mascot -- Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat -- on the medal stand Tuesday.
Aussie, Aussie, Oy, Oy, Oy.
The Down Under media are an interesting lot, with stories about a kangaroo invading a North Sydneysider's home (the man rebuffed it with a bourbon bottle), Olympic scalpers, rape charges against a foreign athlete, drug tests that uncover what they call "cheats," the theft of U.S. kayakers' equipment, the dinner with NBC's Dick Ebersol and Australia's richest man, and an escaped prisoner who allegedly took some Korean athletes on a harrowing stolen-car ride. You can find the coverage online: the Sydney Morning Herald at www.smh.com.au, Sports Today at www.sportstoday.com.au/olympics.
And if you dare to give the network a go, it's at www.seven.com.au.
Chain saw massacre
In case you missed it, Nike pulled that "Friday the 13th" spoof of a commercial barely two days after it started airing the spot on NBC's Olympics broadcasts.
The ad, in which a chain saw-wielding masked man tuckers out trying to keep up with a fleeing woman (tag line: "Why sport? You'll live longer."), was met with thousands of critical phone calls and e-mails. While this reporter learned to overcome the ad's borderline-tasteless approach, the parody of teen slasher movies apparently struck many people as promoting violence toward women. It was yanked from rotation Monday.
The woman in the commercial is Nike-sponsored middle-distance runner Suzy Favor Hamilton.
No word yet if the second Nike ad, featuring cyclist Lance Armstrong giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to an elephant, has been found offensive by animal rights types, but it certainly does turn the stomach.
You can reach Chuck Finder at cfinder@post-gazette.com
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