COMMERCIAL matters, apparently, sank the BBC’s ancient (or, at least, 50-year-old) claim to the Boat Race, rather than any feelings on the part of the event’s management about the services provided by Barry Davies, the commentator. Indeed, I’m sure the organisers would agree with me that Davies, for all his efforts in the realm of football, has indisputably carved a niche for himself as the Voice of Two Boats Full Of Students Going Up The Thames Very Close To One Another, and finding his like is going to exercise ITV sorely when it takes over the coverage of the annual contest next year.
The deal-breaker was, allegedly, that the BBC was not prepared to mention the sponsors often enough. Which only makes you wonder how often is enough. If I had a pound for every time over the past few years that Grandstand’s Steve Rider has worked the unwieldy phrase “Aberdeen Asset Management” into his riverside banter, I’d probably have reason to employ an Aberdeen Asset manager to ensure that I was maximising the accumulated money’s potential.
Yet the bare fact is that Julia Lindsay, a former executive at Saatchi and Saatchi, has arrived with a brief to rethink the event’s image and the decision has been taken that something about the way the BBC says “Good afternoon from Putney” is standing between the Boat Race and its potential to be “a £75 million global brand”.
Some have expressed surprise and dismay upon seeing naked commercialism raise its gaudy flag over what one took to be one of tradition’s most sturdy outposts, but it probably doesn’t benefit us to get too upset. Such is the relentless march of sport in our time, and the days when the Boat Race was an arbitrary challenge for honour between amateurs are . . . well, they’re still with us, actually. But you get what I mean.
The usual anxiety, when ITV snaffles a sporting event previously shown by the BBC, is that what once came to us in blissfully free-flowing, minute-by-minute coverage will now be broken into small jagged pieces around commercial breaks. This was certainly an objection made loudly when Formula One went to ITV; and, indeed, a small number of crucial overtaking manoeuvres from recent seasons have been lost to those of us watching live at home because, at the time, we were busy being sold cider and razor blades.
Here, however, the Boat Race has brevity on its side. Despite the burden of being potentially a £75 million global brand, it tends to be all over within 20 minutes — even sooner than that if somebody sinks. Presumably, if ITV can run to 45 minutes of football without an interval, then it can hold back from selling things for the duration of one white-knuckle journey by water between Putney and Mortlake. And this pretty much eliminates the risk that we will return from a bunch of advertisements for dog food and Linda Barker-designed soft furnishings to discover the race is a boat shy.
That concern negated, we should perhaps be positive and concentrate on the benefits that might accrue to the Boat Race from its new arrangement. Everything gains from a shake-up now and again and, with a new, excited team ready to strip the event down and look at each of its constituent parts afresh, who knows in what shape the Boat Race might eventually emerge?
“ITV clearly understood the event,” Christopher Rodrigues, the London representative of the university boat clubs, said this week, making clear his belief that the event’s new broadcaster is well placed to take what is, at present, merely a simple quirk on the sporting calendar, enjoyed by only 7.7 million people in Britain and 400 million in 180 other countries, and move it up a level. You will hear some people say that the Boat Race is already as popular as a once-a-year, two-boat race between elite universities could be. But maybe that is to reckon without ITV’s proven ability to deliver light entertainment in consistently viewer-winning formats.
Some mild alterations to the competition as it stands may be necessary. But if anyone has the nerve to make them, ITV has, and come next year, we could easily witness the BBC’s standard, oh-so-familiar package on Grandstand replaced by any bone of the following:
Boat Idol contestants vie for a place in the Oxford and Cambridge boats by singing, unaccompanied, a Celine Dion track of their choice. A panel consisting entirely of James Cracknell then tells them how crap they are, but the ultimate decision on who floats and who sinks is left with the public, voting by phone.
The potential for democratising the race is one of the key appeals of this approach. In the past, Boat Race crew members have tended to be of forbiddingly athletic build and from Texas. Here, there would be a chance to break the stereotypical mould and open out the contest’s appeal by putting a few dumpy British people in there.
Who Wants To Be In The Boat Race? Chris Tarrant puts crew members on the spot with a number of pertinent questions, including how they managed to bunk off so many lectures without getting thrown out of college.
I’m In The Boat Race — Get Me Out Of Here! Two crews coxed by Gail Porter and Dave Lee Travis, and existing solely on a diet of jungle grubs and 24-hour attention, have to construct their own boat using only naturally occurring resins and torn-up old copies of Heat magazine, and then sail it for a fortnight down a whitewater rapid deep in the Australian rainforest. Viewers phone in nightly to decree which crew member gets tossed to the crocodiles and which ones have to continue living in contrived isolation with Porter and Travis. Sponsored by Bailey’s.
Clearly the opportunities for popular, commercial expansion are numerous. That said, if the organisers are to grow the Boat Race brand in the manner they desire, they will probably need ultimately to end the relentless domination of the event by Oxford and Cambridge. Year after year at the Boat Race, it’s the same two sides going head to head for the trophy. It’s worse than Scottish football in this respect.
And much though you’ve got to admire the awesome consistency demonstrated, season in, season out, by these two crews in being perennially there or thereabouts when the big rowing honours are handed out, surely anyone with the interests of the sport at heart would be delighted to see boats from some of the cheaper universities finally being given their chance. Over to ITV, then, and the woman from Saatchi and Saatchi.
