Olympic Sized Reality Show

It’s time for the World’s biggest reality show – the Olympics.

There will be winners, losers, characters we’ll want to see gone. There’ll be contested votes and odd people from all walks of life. There are a million B-stories and a great big finale. All, thankfully, without Ryan Seacrest.

Yes, I’m trying to justify why I’m writing about the Olympics. I think I make a good argument – so, I’m afraid you’ll just have to go with me.

Television is all about story-telling. Even news is about story-telling – that’s the chief form of storytelling in my view. Drama is easy – you get to write the lines and scenes; reality TV you get to cast the stupidest, most prone-to-being-nude characters you can find; but in news and sports you have to tell the stories of the people you’re given.

This is why I’ve been so frustrated with the NBC coverage of the games. I think they’ve totally missed the point.

Now, you’ll have to forgive me for sounding holier than thou for a moment, but I’m about to make a small reference to something I think we’ve traditionally done better in the UK – big World-wide audience events. I don’t get to do it often. So enjoy.

It’s partly because we lose a lot more often than we win events, but I think Britain’s generally humbled political position, (we gave most of the World back to its rightful owners some time ago, you might have heard about it?), means that we take far more interest in the Olympic theme of ‘Putting Aside the Petty Politics of the Day and Celebrating Excellence in Sports’.

What I mean, is in the UK, we get to learn about the other competitors, too.

Two nights ago I watched Michael Phelps winning one of his many Golds, if I hadn’t gone on line to search for the photos, according to the NBC coverage I could have safely assumed the guy was in the pool all by himself. While ‘one man-one pool’ events might be totally all-American, they’re certainly not good story-telling.

Aside from my wanting to see more of the other people because they’re from all over the place and because they’ve also spent the last four years training for this one special day, I also needed to see these people because they are a vital part of the story of the unfolding drama of the race. Who did he beat? Was it close? Was someone else ahead at any point? I don’t know.  Without the shots of the others I was left genuinely unmoved by Phelps’ World Record breaking achievement. And that’s the worst part of all of this.

I’ll take you back to the opening ceremony, the Parade of Champions. Matt Lauer had just done his opening, proclaiming that “we’ll put all the politics aside for now”…  we’d seen that awesome spectacle of the main show, then it was time for the Olympians to march in, waving their flags, smiling at a billion moms around the Globe.

I’m a bit of a school-girl about these things, and I go weak at the knees when someone plays some stirring music and says anything to a gathered crowd about ‘coming together we can overcome…’, ‘we’re all one World’, ‘we are the children’… and don’t even get me started on anything about going to the Moon.

So, for me I love it in the BBC coverage when the commentators, for a couple of hours remind us that all those Suits in power, invading each other, putting sanctions on him or making resolutions against her, are all rather silly.  What’s really important is that ‘the athletes from X and Y are amazingly holding hands and hugging’. What’s important now is the sports and human achievement.

As I watched the Parade this time on NBC, the audience was offered over an hour of remarks about invasions, partisan politics, ‘silly costumes’ and then, to top it off, coming back in from ad breaks, we were given a quick, edited montage of all those countries who aren’t really that important.  Now, this wasn’t a live event, so it’s not like we would have missed these countries otherwise – this was a decision – this was how NBC have decided to tell this story.

There’s often an attitude, one which is sometimes correct, that American audiences don’t watch unless there’s an America on tv. With the Olympics I think this completely, and dangerously misses the point.  American’s have so few opportunities to see citizens of other countries in any other context than on the news; burning effigies of Bush, or blood-soaked, running away from the effects of a suicide bomber – that to get to see them as real people who can sometime run faster than us, is not only important, but also the responsibility of the broadcaster.

With the accepted history now being that Bush’s Whitehouse manipulated information in order to invade Iraq, that they lied and covered up the fact that they had no evidence… and that the news organizations and broadcasters in the USA were lazy pawns who let them get away with it - I feel that events like the Olympics are vital in giving us the background to the World; all part of the story which may drip-feed into the public consciousness, into the news organizations, so that next time something like Iraq rears its head, Americans will see, rather than just a dusty country full of rock-throwers, ripe for the invading; these other people from other countries, with Moms, and an emotional tear when they win, are all a vital part of OUR story.