Andrew Kay comments on the commentators

No one was more surprised by my fascination with the recent Olympic revels than I. Sporty I am not, but somehow I was swept along by the excitement and actually found myself enjoying it.

Having been filled with dread after seeing our shameful ‘bus and belisha beacon’ efforts in Beijing, I was thrilled by the outside-the-box thinking of Danny Boyle and his team. The opening had a few cloying moments, but on the whole it was a huge success and I ate my hat as a result – metaphorically speaking that is; I tend not to wear hats.

The events themselves, in shocking pink arenas, had a certain appeal. I enjoyed the swimming and the cycling, both sports I once enjoyed myself, and there is a graceful calm to dressage that I find soothing.
One thing did get on my nerves, and that was the commentary. I have lots of time for Sue Barker, Gary Lineker and Clare Balding; they know their stuff and they can share a joke, too. No, it was during the women’s triathlon that I lost my patience. The triathlon is an exciting but rather long event, but it certainly does not lack action. There was something going on all the way through, clashes and crashes galore, as the ladies sped through the water, cycled past the palace and trotted around the park. I was fascinated by it all, that is until the commentators ran out of relevant stuff to say about the sport.

“There was no sense that the speakers knew anything whatsoever about what they were waffling on about”

It was then that they started to read stuff out about incidental things that the competitors passed. We were told who had made the sculpture atop the arch at the corner of Piccadilly and Park Lane. We were told that rich Middle Eastern business men liked to summer at The Dorchester. We were regaled with the heraldic mysteries of the Queen Mother gates, the making of the Serpentine and all manner of other trivial titbits. What grated was that they were clearly being read out from either a computer monitor or some script collated by a researcher. However they had been produced, it was simply tedious stuff that sounded like a string of Wikipedia entries. There was certainly no sense that the speakers actually knew anything whatsoever about what they were waffling on about. This was all made too clear when one referred to a work of sculpture as “a piece of fine architecture”.

This was the BBC, upholder of all that is good, but on this occasion dumbing down in a way that eventually had me turning off in disgust. If you really don’t know what you are talking about, commentators, then for goodness sake – shut up!