Ordinary Gweilo

During the 1998 World Cup there was blanket coverage on the terrestrial channels in Hong Kong, with several games shown live on all four channels.  ATV World had the BBC commentary, and TVB had the international commentary, whilst there was Cantonese on Home & Jade.  I never understood quite why they needed to do that when 99% of all TV sets sold in Hong Kong have Nicam – couldn’t they have shared the games as ITV & BBC do in the UK? 

How things have changed.  For this World Cup, TVB Pearl’s coverage consists of a very brief programme after the 9.30 news – I haven’t caught it yet, but I suppose it must just be the goals.  That’s not quite all, because TVB Jade has an extended highlights show at 11.00 (with a break for the news), and if you switch to the English audio you get Andrew Sams and Mark Grainger doing their best to talk you through the games.  Are TVB too mean to pay for the full commentary, or is it technically too difficult to edit the games with English commentary?

I believe that the terrestrial channels are only allowed to show the games a certain number of hours after they have finished.  As I recall, for the last World Cup (or was it the European Championships) TVB had a highlights show at breakfast time, but that’s not happening here.  Watching games a full day after they were played doesn’t really have much appeal.

Meanwhile Cable TV has full live coverage of all the games.  It’s in their own unique style, but fortunately during the games they do have English commentary (similar to the EPL coverage, but without summarisers).  There is no pre-game or post-game analysis, but at least we get the games.

Perhaps they should have signed-up Ron Atkinson.  He was dropped by both ITV and The Guardian after making racist comments, and is now offering his comments for free at Selfcast.

One other thing – who designed such horrible and obtrusive graphics, and how did they manage to get the Korean names the wrong way round?  The commentator managed to say the names correctly, so why couldn’t they display them properly?  Poor show.