Get ready for another great summer of sport - Euro 2004, test cricket, Wimbledon, the Open Championship and the Olympics. Who could ask for more? Viewers could. We could ask for better television sports coverage.
In the beginning, all sports television had to do was turn up with the cameras and a commentator. Then came a series of technological revolutions: colour (first used in tennis coverage on BBC2), slow motion replays, satellites bringing us live coverage from across the world - the Tokyo and Mexico Olympics, the 1970 World Cup.
The new technology and an extraordinary generation of sports commentators made for a golden age of sports on television. Who can forget "They think it's all over," Eddie Waring's pronunciation of "up and under," Dan Maskell on "the great Drobny" or David Coleman on the great Cuban sprinter, Alberto Juantorena, "opening his legs and showing his class"? Commentators like Waring and Murray Walker, Brian Johnston ("Johnners"), Richie Benaud and John Arlott, Maskell and Harry Carpenter, were the heroes of British television during the 1960s and 1970s.
It is a more complicated story than it seems, however. There was much that the cameras never showed us and that commentators didn't want to talk about. Why did some sports appear on television and not others? Who decided, for example, that wrestling should be a television sport? Or rugby league? How did the boat race become a national television institution? Why did money, so obviously important in the real world of sport, remain invisible?
The greatest blind spot of television sport was politics. There was some grumbling about the Mexico Olympics in 1968, coming so soon after hundreds of students had been shot in Mexico City, but that was quickly forgotten in the excitement about David Hemery's gold medal. I don't recall Brian Moore or Motty getting too worked up about the1978 World Cup being held in General Galtieri's Argentina, or Harry Carpenter and Reg Gutteridge discussing corruption in boxing. Did Kent Walton spoil the fun by telling us how wrestling matches were fixed? And which football commentators attacked - or even commented on - the racist chanting from the terraces, which was endemic through the 1960s and 1970s?
Television's problem with sports politics hit the headlines recently with Ron Atkinson's off-the-mic slip. It was the subject of countless articles in the press, but was too hot to handle for television. Just two nights later, during ITV's live coverage of a Uefa Cup match, did Gabby Logan and the boys have anything to say about Ron's disappearance from our screens? He'd vanished into the memory hole and become a television non-person. To this day, television football has to be squeaky clean. The world of drugs, gang bangs in hotels, agents' bungs and financial incompetence is airbrushed out. Football on television is a kind of small screen Potemkin village.
Commentators in general cut out the more troubling aspects of the sport - violence in rugby union, sledging and verbal abuse in cricket, gymnasts and boxers crippled by years of playing on with cortisone injections or of being punched in the head.
The BBC and ITV have always run from sport's darker side. They didn't want to spoil their cosy arrangements with sponsors and sport's ruling bodies. Not surprisingly, the innovations in sports coverage have come from elsewhere; Channel 4 and Sky in particular.
Channel 4 introduced American football in the 1980s and Italian soccer in the 1990s, and has transformed cricket. They kept Richie Benaud, but brought in smart new commentators, led by Mark Nicholas. They developed new computer visuals (Hawkeye) and technical analysis by Simon Hughes.
Sky revolutionised football coverage. Andy Gray pioneered a new kind of analysis, very different from the blokey badinage of ex-Liverpool players (on BBC1) and cheeky cockneys (on ITV). On the main networks, television pundits still speak as if tactics or coaching hadn't been invented. It's a world away from, say, Big Ron's (ex-) Monday Guardian column, with its detailed tactical analysis. Interestingly, more sophisticated discussion is allowed in rugby, cricket or tennis commentary, not because the experts are smarter but because football viewers are presumed to be too stupid to understand anything too complicated. Perhaps it is because many of these commentators are foreign - John McEnroe, Boris Becker and Pat Cash, Ian Smith and Michael Lynagh - and aren't used to speaking down to television audiences. It's not surprising that the best athletics commentator, by far, is an American, the ex-sprinter Michael Johnson.
With big audiences at stake, BBC executives want human interest stories, not technique. This summer, prepare for lots of Sally Gunnell asking athletes how they "feel" or for close-ups of relatives and boyfriends in the stadium.
There are two cultures of television sport today. Channel 4, Sky and the smarter experts talking about rugby and tennis show how it can be done. Back at the BBC and ITV, especially when talking about football and athletics, we're still in the stone age. A great summer of sport? Yes, of course. Just don't mention politics, money or race.
