I Get What the BBC Is For Now

…it’s a job creation scheme for gold medal winning athletes from years ago. The Winter Olympics is a case in point. The main qualification seems to be respectable and middle-class rather than to know anything much about the sport. I’m used to people like Sue Barker and Gary Lineker presenting programmes and the likes of Steve Cram do a reasonable job presenting and Matthew Pinsent makes a relatively enthusiastic reporter but this Winter Olympics seems to have the medal winning presenters and reporters crossing the liminal zone into commentator and pundit territory. Therefore Matthew Pinsent has been volunteering his expertise on both curling and ice hockey. He’s a nice chap (I’ve even held one of his gold medals at a corporate event) but I wonder how much more he knows about these sports than any viewer who’s read the papers and watched a bit of it on television. I guess the BBC would argue that he has a unique insight into the psychologyof the medal winning athletes — but that argument is utterly self-defeating because if none of the audience thought they had an ability to try and imagine what it’s like to win gold then the viewing figures would probably be cut by about 95%.