I hate CCTV5

I mentioned the other day over on The Barstool that I had been getting particularly vexed that my enjoyment of the present Euro '08 football tournament on Chinese television was being impaired by the fact that they don't display the game clock. (Well, they do during the original live broadcast, although it's almost invisible - thin, dim, tiny white numerals against a red swoosh logo in the top right of the screen. On later re-runs, the game clock is removed altogether. WHY??) It is quite maddening if you switch on after the start of the game and have no indication at all of how long there is left to play (an uncertainty increased further by the fact that the timing of the re-runs seems to change subtly from day to day!!).

My friend DD - a part-time journalist as well as my regular recording partner - was supposed to be interviewing the director of CCTV5 the other day, and, knowing that I was quite a sports fan, asked if I had any suggestions for tough questions she could ask him about the station's coverage. Naturally enough, I launched immediately into about 5 minutes of invective about the NO GAME CLOCK issue. I'm not sure if she brought this up with him or not. If she did, nothing has yet been done to rectify the oversight.

Switching on at noon the other day to try and find the mid-day(ish) re-run of the previous evening's European games, I happened to catch the tail-end of an international volleyball match. This is much more of a big deal in China, since it is a sport they have lately come to excel at (although I think the men's team - in competition here against Australia - are not quite the invincible world-beaters that the Chinese women are). Here, they weren't displaying THE SCORE!!! I found it oddly touching that the CCTV5 idiots are equally capable of fucking up the presentation of a sport that the local audience cares about (although, actually, football is pretty damn popular here - even though the Chinese national team can't play for shit).

This year, CCTV5 - the national sports channel - has replaced the '5' in its logo with the five Olympic rings. I suppose they will be intimately involved in producing the coverage of the Olympic events (although, no doubt, with a hefty input of foreign equipment and expertise). All I can say is - god help us all! Expect: incidents shown out of chronological order; lots of irrelevant reaction shots of Chinese competitors not in medal contention; key parts of the screen obscured by superimposed Chinese captions/banners; key pieces of information - scores, times, names and countries of competitors - illegible, erroneous, or completely absent.

(A further gripe about the football coverage: they don't show the team lists before the game. Really, how hard would it be to prepare a quick lineup - in Chinese and English - to let us know who is playing where?? Aaaaarrrggh!)

By the way, football lovers, do go and check out this comment thread over on my other blog, where some old college buddies of mine and I have been teasing each other about our prognostications on the results of the current European Championships.