In which I have my olympic rant
I have rarely had the urge or the need to watch CCTV television. Frankly my Chinese is wanting and CCTV’s Dialogue program pisses me off in ways I don’t need in a country where my livelyhood rests on passing annual blood pressure tests. Though on the 8th of August I finally got around to calling up the Jiangsu cable TV guys to come and install another box underneath my TV in time for the opening ceremony (with the DVD player, Satellite TV and Wii it’s getting rather crowded down there). So now I can recieve local channels and a few provincial channels from around China with a handy onscreen channel listing much like the sat box.
CCTV has done a great job of providing a great variety of sports on the 6 or channels they have commandered for the event. I have a natural disposition towards the team sports, such as the volleyball, baseball (two sports I would never otherwise watch) and field hockey (which I used to play at school) where Natalia our resident “remote nazi” has been getting into the equestrian and athletics. I was also fortunate enough to catch, by chance, New Zealand twins, Georgina and Caroline Evers-Swindell, taking the double sculling title for the second consecutive time and as an unexpected sideeffect of Olympic Fever, I’ve developed an adolecent crush on the bubbly Saori Kimura of the Japanese womans volley ball team who enjoys shopping, pasta and cheese cake. (OMG me too!)
One thing I would like to see more of though is balanced sports commentary by the CCTV team. Now I don’t mean the coverage, this is China and it’s China’s olympics, though from what I’ve seen so far the CCTV commentary box serves more as a patriotic cheer squad than a commentary team. For example, what could they say about the Evers-Swindell twins beating the Chinese rowers to gold? “Mei Guan Xi” or no problem **cut to the 37th olympic montage of the day**. Don’t get me wrong sports commentary is never going to be totally unbiased, though it would be nice to hear somethng other than “Hao Qiu! PIAOLIANG! every 30 seconds. Perhaps when the opposition wins a point, say something about the skill of the shot, the background of the player or what actually just happenned on the court, rather than silence, excuses or muttering when the Chinese are trailing a point.
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