TV VIEW:DAY THREE and who didn't think of the words of Samuel Johnson?
“Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content. No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile.”
If he was still of this earth and hadn’t left us in 1784 (unless someone was acting the maggot on Wikipedia) you’d be certain Samuel was talking about the BBC’s Olympic red button which offers so many fruits of autumn and flowers of spring you don’t know where to start tasting and sniffing.
It’s a splendid thing, that button, of that there is no doubt, offering, as it does, up to 24 streams of live action. But sometimes too much choice can be discombobulating, like when you set off to find live coverage of our ace sailor Annalise Murphy – RTÉ seemed to spend much of the day looking for the same thing – but get waylaid when you accidentally click on table tennis, and then you forget what you went to the red button for in the first place.
Ideally, you would have a bank of 24 tellies in your living room, giving it a Power City look, the unceasing fear being that you’ll get so wrapped up in what’s on stream 23 you’ll end up missing Ireland winning a medal on stream 15.
(“Where were you when blankety blank won gold for Ireland?!” “Glued to the archery – I only found out about it on Morning Ireland.”) That red button is, of course, the definition of hell for sportaphobes. And you had to feel for them yesterday when, while avoiding RTÉ Two like the plague, they switched on RTE One, only to see live coverage of the Galway Races.
“He had his townhalls removed a fortnight ago and which fella would win a race two weeks after having his townhalls removed,” we heard Ted Walsh declare at the conclusion of a race evidently won by an unfortunate townhalls-less beast.
It got you thinking: why aren’t RTÉ using Ted at the Olympics, working on, say, artistic gymnastics or synchronised swimming? It could be epic.
The BBC aren’t shy about taking their people out of their comfort zones, Eddie Butler, for one, working yesterday on the diving when he’s usually talking rucking and mauling. True, it would be a townhallsie decision by RTÉ, but it could work.
Eddie gave us a typically lyrical introduction to the 10m platform diving final, starring Tom Daley (and Pete Waterfield). We were shown a clip of a nine-year-old Tom with a picture he drew showing himself competing at London 2012 – before London was even awarded the 2012 Games. Spooky.
All was going well for Tom and Pete until their fourth dive, when they made a muck of their reverse three-and-a-half somersault with a tuck – but in fairness, which one of us hasn’t done the same? They had to settle for fourth, then.
If Daley’s day wasn’t the best, it wasn’t ideal for poor old Kohei Uchimura either, the Japanese fella losing his dismounting battle with the pommel horse in the men’s gymnastics team final, sky-rocketing Britain in to second, the crowd going a touch ballistic.
And then there was the Japanese protest over Uchimura’s score, the drama more than a little excellent, those of us who would generally rather have wisdom teeth extracted with a pliers than tune in to gymnastics feeling a bit abashed.
“Boooooooooooooooo,” was the gist of the crowd’s response to the announcement that the judges upped Uchimura’s score by 0.5, much as we had forecast from the couch, thus dropping Britain to third. For a moment it looked like we might have our first gymnastics riot in history (or has there been one before?), but, mercifully, the crowd opted to celebrate bronze rather than rush the judges’ bench. It was tremendously good stuff.
So that’s another medal for our neighbours. Our time will come. It will.
(No pressure Annalise).
Scott Evans’ Olympics are over, though, but having been drawn against the badminton equivalent of Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic rolled in to one – the legend that is Lin ‘Super’ Dan – there’s zilch shame in that. As our former badminton Olympian Sonya McGinn put it in the studio, “his game is just perfect”. And that’s probably understating it.
Meanwhile, ‘Protestant-gate’ rumbles on, Bill O’Herlihy’s observation after Chloe Magee’s victory on Sunday that when he was growing up badminton was “considered a Protestant sport” not going down tremendously well.
Of course, it depends where you came from or what school you attended, but, eh, was he not right? Sure, wouldn’t, say, camogie have been regarded as a Catholic sport? Happily, we’ve long since moved in to a sporty ecumenical phase, but in the auld days that’s just the way things were.
Relax everyone, press the red button and devour the fruits of autumn and sniff the flowers of spring.
