Sport and its audiences

Writing in April 1970, seemingly in the late evening, the eminent cultural theorist Raymond Williams was disenchanted with the state of British television. Still, he consoled his readers in his regular newspaper column on television in the BBC's weekly journal The Listener, "There's always the sport. Or so people say, more and more often, as they become sadder about what is happening to the rest of television" (Williams 1970/1989, p. 95). Williams saw that, if television was failing to realize its promise in other genres and for other purposes, it could be relied upon to deliver sport to good effect. Television, he noted a few years later, had not created spectator sport" urban industrialized leisure had done that" but it had stimulated interest among spectators and provided a new mode of watching sport, because "some of the best television coverage of sport, with its detailed close-ups and its variety of perspectives, has given us a new excitement and immediacy in watching physical action, and even a new visual experience of a distinct kind" (Williams 1974, p. 68). While for Williams television had taken up the practice of engaging in "sporting gossip" long evident within newspapers and among sport supporters and fans, its métier was that it could inexpensively "transmit something that was in any case happening or had happened" (p. 30). It is useful to reflect, from the current vantage point, on Williams's brief account of the relationship between sport and media, and to consider the continuities and ruptures within media sport over the last four decades, especially with regard to audiences. It is clear that sport is still crucial to television" and that television is vital for sport. Of all the forms of media sport, television is still dominant because of its as-yet-unrivalled capacity to represent "live" events to vast, widely dispersed audiences in a manner that plausibly simulates a sense of "having been there" (Whannel 1992; Brookes 2002; Rowe and Stevenson 2006). Television also constitutes a sprawling media space where, as Williams notes, sport and sport-related matters can be endlessly discussed, previewed, and reviewed (Boyle and Haynes 2000; Rowe 2004a). Thus, television and the media that preceded and then accompanied it have been central to the extension of sport audiences beyond the stadium, in the process refashioning media audiences. It is to these formations" which are multiple rather than singular" that the focus of this chapter will turn.