Bellowing boorish broadcasters

If you were trying to make a sale, or convince a corporate meeting of the benefit of your strategy, would you shout to make your point? Probably only once, before you looked for a new career.

There are voice professionals who know how to convey a sense of exhilaration by their careful use of style and intonation, however, they seldom describe sporting events. Instead, they apply their skills and lengthy experience to marrying emotion and words with extraordinary ability. But then, that is their craft, and they hone it well. That is why they are able to earn a good income by applying their ability on behalf of advertisers.

On the other hand, the would-be-if-they-could-be sports commentators, usually marked by slangishly nasal accents and unrounded vowels (sorry, Julia), have created a sort of genré of colloquialism that sets them apart from other media types. Classically!

They present as the boorish uncultured bogans of broadcast, every bit as down market as many winners of sporting contests who celebrate with champagne, not by drinking it, but by shaking the bottle then squirting it over each other. This kind of sight and sound is becoming accepted as normal in a society which increasingly cannot, will not, or perhaps does not, know how to celebrate gracefully.

I will never forget a beautiful example of restrained, highly effective, sports broadcasting I encountered in a filmed news coverage of an English horse race many years ago.

Although delivering a seemingly unscripted call, the commentator sounded knowledgeable about each horse and jockey as, with professional dramatic ability, he took us through from the entry to the barrier, the jump, then to the crossing of the line in steadily increasing excitement, but never did he shout!

Instead, he varied the pace of his description, rising up in pitch, yet used carefully-positioned short pauses to bolster our interest, until the winner crossed the line. All the time, his comprehensible well-delivered language backgrounded what we were watching. Judging by the way he used language for effect I suspect that his background may well have been the theatre, and it was in huge contrast to the bellowing boofs yelling today's Australian coverage of sport.

I had the fortune to work, both in radio and television, with one of the country's leading race callers, Ken Howard, and he had this valued style; he used the tone of his voice, not its loudness, to generate excitement, and it worked ... London-to-a-brick on!

Clichéd shouting illness has also struck some TV news journalists who edit sports stories, particularly Rugby League. The scripted voice over presentation is often interspersed with a two or three word shouted grab from the original commentary, as though to confirm what is being reported. Or is that editing style just a current trendy habit?

Watch, and listen carefully to this very stereotypical presentation format during the next TV news sports report you encounter. That is, if you can bring yourself to suffer a little cultural cringe.