Looking at the coverage from ITV and BBC as well as the newspapers’ podcasts at Germany 2006.
Back in the days of yore, before the advent of Rupert Murdoch's wall-to-wall multi-channel sportathons, football on TV was a rare event with certain occasions like the FA Cup final shown simultaneously by both the BBC and ITV.
The viewing figures for the BBC always swamped the ITV coverage - one assumes due to the Beeb's perceived reputation for quality and the fact there were no adverts. In reality there was very little difference between the two but old habits die hard and even though the World Cup coverage is shared between them with no clashes, a small shudder goes through me when I see I have to switch to ITV to watch a match.
The biggest innovation that ITV have introduced in recent seasons has been to bafflingly park Andy Townsend and Ally McCoist in front of a table on the pitch, to provide some much un-needed punditry pre and post-match during Champions League games.
Thankfully, the Germans have seen sense and not allowed the deadly duo to invade the sanctity of the playing area and are safely locked in the studio with the winsome Gaby Logan (who has thankfully toned down the black eyeliner she has been sporting recently).
The ITV world cup analysis is the "same-old same-old" - ex-pros talking about teams they've never actually bothered to watch before and commentators constantly reminding us to "press the red button" to enter competitions and visit the website.
For the Argentina v Ivory Coast game, Stuart Pearce gave the sort of no-nonsense attitude we've come to expect from the Man City boss while Jay-Jay Okocha (presumably chosen because he is African and thus can speak for the entire continent) came across as brain-damaged - his performance was as convincing as the ones he's been giving for Bolton Wanderers recently.
I would say the pathetic Budweiser bumper adverts after each commercial break (two "American" sports presenters not knowing anything about football) are the worst thing about ITV's coverage but that award goes to their other offering on their digital channel ITV4 - World Cuppa .
This abortion of a programme is in the vein of laddish stealth-variety shows like the BBC's old Fantasy Football and Sky's current Soccer AM. It has none of the genuine humour of the former nor the self-confident (and entirely unwarranted) swagger of the latter.
This is thin post-pub fare filmed in front of a thin post-pub audience. Presented by DJ Christian O'Connell with help from token-woman Natalie Pinkham and sports hack Steve Bunce, it is entirely witless.
The unlucky guests on the night I watched were former Arsenal and England captain Tony Adams, former Liverpool and Ireland utility man Jason McAteer and Gretna's uber-goal getter and real-life doctor Kenny Deuchar. All three looked utterly bemused at the pedestrian antics going around them which included an abusive marionette of Diego Maradona, some footage of an old woman watching the England match and former Wimbledon player Warren Barton woodenly reading out facts on Trinidad while pretending to be an estate agent. Amazingly, it is even unfunnier than it sounds.
The ending sketch has a dog in an England t-shirt choosing to eat from one of three bowls of food labelled with 'win', 'lose' or 'draw' to predict the result of England's next match. In Steve Bunce's only coherent comment of the night, he stated that "the dog's petrified". I know how it feels. But with added anger.
Unfortunately World Cuppa clashed with BBC2's World Cup Stories, an excellent series of hour-long documentaries that focuses on one team per episode and their footballing histories. The edition on England re-told the familiar story of 1966 and Gazza's tears in 1990 and was the weakest - the others were very good, especially the Argentinian story of the junta-backed 1978 World Cup and the final one focusing on Italy's fascist past and the emotional failure of 1990. This intelligent series was hugely enjoyable with some useful additions, for once, from the 'talking heads' - journalists and sociologists as well as the players.
The BBC's World Cup coverage proper is much like ITV's. Thankfully the incisive Martin O'Neill has been retained along with Gordon Strachan and Iain Dowie - the rest are bog-standard say-what-you-see ex-pros. I was slightly alarmed before the Mexico-Iran match to see a long-haired gentleman in the studio who I mistook for Celebrity Love Island's (and one-time Man Utd starlet) Lee Sharpe. Luckily, it was just Brazil's 1994 World Cup winner (and vicious elbower, remember?) Leonardo.
Adrian Chiles replicates his Match of the Day 2 role as anchor for the late night highlights package. I could do without Celina Hinchcliffe's roving reports among the fans but then I am an old curmudgeon with no interest in anyone else's enjoyment. And although the studio is picturesquely situated by the Brandenburg Gate on Pariser Platz, this is also the gathering place for late night revellers who bellow "Strachan - give us a wave" during the transmission - a bit off-putting for both the viewer and Gordon Strachan, who gamely keeps his focus on explaining Serbia and Montenegro's faulty offside trap.
This World Cup is the first to see use of that new-fangled podcast technology. The two most notable are from newspapers: The Guardian's daily World Cup Show hosted by James Richardson (famous for presenting Italian football in the UK) and the Times's resurrection of the David Baddiel-Frank Skinner comedy double-act, who presented the popular Fantasy Football television shows.
The Guardian's podcast is 30 minutes and released daily - largely filled with predictions of upcoming matches and reviews of the previous day's games, it may be too much of more-of-the-same if you saw the game and have already read the match reports online or in the paper itself. However, anything presented by the urbane Richardson is worth a few minutes of your time.
The Baddiel/Skinner podcast is also roughly 30 to 40 minutes long but not daily - it seems to arrive whenever they have enough material. Anyone familiar with the Fantasy Football programme will know the drill - David and Frank chat about the matches and anything amusing they've seen on their trip to Germany. If you found the format a little tired when it disappeared from air a couple of years ago, then don't bother. Their digs at Peter Crouch are a little lazy and the songs tiresome which doesn't leave much, to be honest. If you have too much time on your hands (like me) you can give it a go and make your own mind up -- I still think they're quite funny.
