Cultural forms of television : sport

Of all the cultural forms of television, sport stands out as the most conspicuous case where television found an external partner that produced something immeasurably more significant than either party could have managed if operating in isolation. Television creates its text through many different arrangements. In this chapter, I will set out to probe the development and significance of sports television. In the process, I suggest that this ‘marriage made in heaven’ has been marked by deep passions of both a positive and negative kind, evidencing a level of co-dependency that has continually raised issues of power, both over who controls sport and how much sport can ‘extract’ from television.