TV stations failing to maintain visual archive of football history Rohan Connolly
The Age
December 15, 2013 If you're a subscriber to the Fox Footy channel, you get tremendous wall-to-wall coverage of your favourite sport around the clock, day after day.
Well, at least until a couple of days after the grand final. When, barring the odd exception like the AFL draft, the station reverts to a football equivalent of the old test pattern, in the form of rolling replays of the season just gone, game by game, round after round.
If you for some reason happened to miss a favourite win by your team this year and have enough foresight, you can set your IQ to see it again. Or you can, like a lot of footyheads seem to be doing, effectively tune out until next February.
Once upon a time, the channel, which had the rights to screen old ABC archival material, would screen old home and away games, finals, even old episodes of that cult favourite The Winners, host Drew Morphett's wide lapels and 1970s and '80s colour schemes as much a highlight as the action itself.
But football nostalgia is more passé´ these days, the premium almost exclusively on live action and the here and now, so much so that Fox has canned even its own contemporary version of The Winners, a highlights package reviewing every game of the round.
Replays have gone the way of the dinosaur and it seems anything more than five minutes after a final siren is redundant, hence Channel Seven's mad scramble to get to its 6pm news after its Sunday afternoon game, often with barely seconds to spare.
In its more recent incarnation as an official broadcaster, Seven had steadfastly refused to create any football programming beyond its live broadcasts until in August it belatedly revived the long-dormant Talking Footy. Its use of archival material remains largely confined to the grand final eve Footy Marathon, usually with the same roll call of old premiership deciders.
"It's all about costs," one TV source says. "When you pay the sort of premiums networks do now for sports rights, there's nothing left over. It's actually pretty counter-productive. In the end, it can be pretty harmful to the TV product."
Not to mention less "sexy" but no less significant issues. The sort of historical legacy with which we'll be left with decades down the track, and the depth of the attachment being forged between the game and its newer generations of followers, who for all today's technological resources, are arguably being denied the sort of cultural education in football their ancestors received.
It's a good example of not seeing the forest for the trees. And that's something to which television has never been particularly alert.
When Ten network's head of sport Dave Barham began to make a celebrated football documentary, 100 Years of Football for the 1996 centenary season, he was shocked by what he discovered when he went to search long-time broadcaster Seven's archives. Or, more accurately, didn't discover.
"They didn't have many matches, save for a few finals. There were just two hours left of World of Sport. It was a tragedy. We were staggered," he says. Barham went to then-AFL chief executive Ross Oakley and offered to start building a film library for $30,000.
"I kept everything from about 1991. So in 20 years' time, you'll be able to see everything on Gary Ablett [snr], James Hird or Nathan Buckley. But people talk about John Coleman, how he could jump straight up and fly over packs … there's no footage."
What's particularly galling about the lack of care for televisual football history are the inevitably favourable responses when someone does manage to see the light of day.
Like the Final Story documentary series Pete Dickson has made for the AFL over the past three years, the recently screened instalment on the 1989 grand final was a superb testament to one of the most memorable games ever played.
Indeed, what has become one of football's favourite and most instantly recognisable quotes, Hawthorn coach John Kennedy's plea to his players at half-time of the 1975 grand final to: "Don't think. Do!" was discovered almost by accident, as Barham was making 100 Years of Football.
Barham had been contacted by a filmmaker who 20 years earlier had been planning his own documentary on the game, and miked up Kennedy, North Melbourne's Ron Barassi and Richmond's Tom Hafey for the 1975 finals series.
The results were among 38 reels of discarded film sitting in a garage in Brighton. And while the film had been all but rendered useless by the ravages of time, the audio remained of excellent quality.
Many grabs from the trio of legendary coaches that September have been used to effect since.
But how many other old gems that we don't know about have wasted away in someone's garage? Or more criminally, been taped over by television networks without enough foresight?
And as the years pass, just how will the young fans of today, without any remaining living connections to the greats of yesteryear, be able to contextualise thoroughly enough the deeds of the likes of Ted Whitten, John Nicholls, "Polly" Farmer and Bob Skilton, all of whom played long after TV arrived in this country.
"It's hard to know whether the kids are interested or not, because they're just not seeing it," Barham says. "What are they actually seeing that's going to excite them? They're not seeing anything that is teaching them about the great players of the past."
And now, when they're not seeing wall-to-wall live action between March and September, their only choice in televised football is the same games all over again on an endless loop.
Increasingly, it's YouTube rather than television that provides a de facto Australian football archive. For those of us who sometimes struggle going cold turkey in the summer months, the internet site provides many welcome procrastinations.
This week, I stumbled upon a game I covered in my journalistic infancy, the 1985 VFA grand final, memorable for the fact it featured a Williamstown player (the late Ron James) incredibly making his senior debut at the tender age of 14. The same game featured Carlton chief executive Greg Swann at full-back for the Seagulls.
Many football fans of my vintage seem to enjoy reliving such moments, the memory for detail even nearly 30 years on impressive. Football for us remains a passion enhanced by things like the ritual of the grand final eve marathon, or the Football Flashbacks Seven used to screen weekly in prime viewing slots when we were kids.
But you can't help but wonder whether, through no fault of their own, today's kids will have quite the same thirst to look back on football's legacy once they've become adults. And if those who shoot and screen the action don't want to help keep the flame burning to enable them to carry on the torch, just who will?
Read more:
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/tv-stations-failing-to-maintain-visual-archive-of-football-history-20131214-2ze3y.html#ixzz2nXtvtPrx
