Watch sport? I'd rather go to a cafe, mate

By FIONA RAE

It's like this: I'm a poncy Pt Chev media wally and I don't watch sport on TV.

I have only an academic interest in the national game, or other large sporting occasions. I like that Aussie series, The Games.

Most sports programmes seem to consist of several blokes with heightened testosterone (or possibly extra chromosomes) sitting about in a bright studio shouting cliches at each other.

The last time I watched TV3's Saturday Night Football, Hamish McKay did a report from Christchurch that merely confirmed their parochialism.

Murray Deaker is hideous, the Aussie League commentators are worse, having apparently failed English at kindergarten, and any time I've heard Pete Montgomery he's been doing nothing more than shouting lists of sailors' names.

The netball commentators typically begin the night screaming that the Silver Ferns are on fire and end the night eating their words. The cricket commentators are better, especially Ian Smith and that particularly lyrical English chap that sometimes tours. But please, no more Geoffrey Boycott, the miserable girlfriend-beating sod.

This is beginning to look like a total lie about not watching sport on TV. As you can see, I've tried. And having recently discovered the delights of being a Mid-Week Lady at a nearby tennis club, like the big girl I am, when I get the chance, I watch tennis.

And Sports Cafe (Wednesday 8.30 pm, Sky Sport). And before you start whingeing that it's on Sky, it's free to air. That means if you can understand your TV's instruction manual you can tune in.

I watch it because it's funny. It has more than two brain cells to rub together. And, when nearly everything else on telly is controlled, it is unpredictable. Was Marc Ellis really drunk a couple of weeks back? We may never know. Although the public flogging delivered last week was perhaps unwise. For someone with Ellis' — er, interests — it may not have been punishment.

Guests are relaxed and forthcoming. Faced with a series of stupid questions from Ellis (and more knowledgeable ones from Ric Salizzo) their personalities come through, something that doesn't always happen during a formal interview.
Athletes from all codes are invited on to the big couch, taken seriously and given full credit.

Graeme Hill's highlights are a brilliantly amusing antidote to the crash-bang-wallop sportsbites on the news and with The Mex Files, at last someone's had the good sense to record the wisdom of Murray Mexted for posterity.

I won't go on: you get the picture (I haven't even mentioned Lana, Eva or That Guy). And Sports Cafe is not always good. Sometimes the very looseness that makes it fun is its downfall. But that's the good thing about this kind of TV — unlike poor old Gary McCormick, Sports Cafe is allowed to be bad.