Thursday, May 03, 2007
Brawn has it covered
Were you surprised to read Ross Brawn's comments that the British TV coverage of F1 is not good enough? On one level, seeing as I had understood him to be friendly with the presenters, yes. But on another, of course not. He was the technical director of a multi-championship winning team. I don't think there was anyone on that grid who had more information available to them at any one time. As Alex and I have long since known, though, the TV coverage is simply not enough to follow a race. At the very least, you need to be viewing the live-timing from F1.com. But there is more out there, much more, that could help: the telemetry, for instance, and accurate pit-timings would ease a lot of confusion. When watching it on TV, I often feel the commentators are as lost as me - when really they should be guiding us through what is happening.
The question is, though, are Ross Brawn's comments aimed at British TV in particular, or TV in general? It could be possible that, working for Ferrari, he has seen a lot of Italian TV coverage, and generally approved - I believe they normally show every session of a weekend live, for instance. Anyway, what all of this points toward is a very strange picture we couldn't have imagined 5 years ago: Michael and Ross sitting on a couch watching F1. Surely we should ask them to join sofaF1?
The question is, though, are Ross Brawn's comments aimed at British TV in particular, or TV in general? It could be possible that, working for Ferrari, he has seen a lot of Italian TV coverage, and generally approved - I believe they normally show every session of a weekend live, for instance. Anyway, what all of this points toward is a very strange picture we couldn't have imagined 5 years ago: Michael and Ross sitting on a couch watching F1. Surely we should ask them to join sofaF1?
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Maybe they already are!
On a more serious note, I think we have two criticisms here.
1) The TV feed from Bernie is pretty poor. The number of times the home nation's TV company completely focuses on the wrong thing and so on is terrible. They use the same feed as us on the pit wall though so they must be pretty used to it. But they also have two other features one is the live timing screen you mention which is also provided by FOM. And also the top teams at least (probably all by now) have a system which shows them where all of the cars are during the race. Because this is provided by the teams rather than FOM we can't get this. This one thing would be truly brilliant for us to have, and I think along with the living timing is probably what Ross is missing the most.
2. The commentators. The commentating is pretty poor sadly. I really feel for James sometimes because he does get a lot of stick. But he's doing the wrong job. He wants to be Martin and both commentators can't be Martin. One person needs to be describing the race. One person needs to be editorialising the race. Both can't be editorialising or as we find they won't have anything to edit.
So all in all I don't blame them. And second I think that Ferrari have always had a pretty poor relationship with ITV. I don't know why but I think it is partly remaining bad blood between Michael and Martin. Also Louise really disliked Michael. James wrote a book about Michael which I don't think Schumacher liked even though it was pretty praising. I think Ted was the only one who seemed to really like him and he was probably a bit too marginal a character. All of this must have been apparent to Ross.
On a more serious note, I think we have two criticisms here.
1) The TV feed from Bernie is pretty poor. The number of times the home nation's TV company completely focuses on the wrong thing and so on is terrible. They use the same feed as us on the pit wall though so they must be pretty used to it. But they also have two other features one is the live timing screen you mention which is also provided by FOM. And also the top teams at least (probably all by now) have a system which shows them where all of the cars are during the race. Because this is provided by the teams rather than FOM we can't get this. This one thing would be truly brilliant for us to have, and I think along with the living timing is probably what Ross is missing the most.
2. The commentators. The commentating is pretty poor sadly. I really feel for James sometimes because he does get a lot of stick. But he's doing the wrong job. He wants to be Martin and both commentators can't be Martin. One person needs to be describing the race. One person needs to be editorialising the race. Both can't be editorialising or as we find they won't have anything to edit.
So all in all I don't blame them. And second I think that Ferrari have always had a pretty poor relationship with ITV. I don't know why but I think it is partly remaining bad blood between Michael and Martin. Also Louise really disliked Michael. James wrote a book about Michael which I don't think Schumacher liked even though it was pretty praising. I think Ted was the only one who seemed to really like him and he was probably a bit too marginal a character. All of this must have been apparent to Ross.
One thing that just occured to me is that Murray was raised, I believe, as a radio commentator, whereas James Allen has only ever done TV. Perhaps we've mentioned this before? But this might go some way to explain why Murray described the action whereas James tries to add comments additional to what we're seeing.
Good point. In fact his very first commentating gig was as a trackside commentator on a Public Announcement system. So presumably one of his key roles was describing what was happening at other parts of the track that the punters couldn't see.
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