Masters TV battle – how Sky and BBC fared

Posted on 27th April 2015 by Adam Ellis in In the Golf Paper | 0 Comments

Award Winner: The BBC’s Ken Brown for his witty Dolly Parton reference

by Martin Johnson

The final round of The Masters has always been one of the most immersive of the televised Majors, especially now that the viewer with a satellite dish gets to experience the same agonising choice as a golfer weighing up whether to take on the 240-yard carry over Rae’s Creek, or lay up with an eight iron. What should it be? Play it safe with the Beeb, or go for it with Sky?

For years, there wasn’t an option. You were stuck with the old Marmite man himself, Peter Alliss, and sooner or later you knew we’d be transported back to the days of spoons, niblicks, and Old Tom Morris’ tweed jacket. Not to mention a medical update on the Hon Sec of Royal Bufferington Golf Club Next The Sea, happily feeling all the better for Peter’s wishes of a speedy recovery from the ingrowing toenail.

Now, though, you can clamber into a time machine and whiz forward a couple of centuries simply by pressing a button on the remote control. At first you think you’ve got the Sci-Fi Channel by mistake, but then you realise it’s only Butch Harmon, whose eyes seem to operate like a par four dog leg, with one of them looking right at you, and the other one coming out the side of the set.

Harmon is pretty good at giving you insights into US PGA Tour players you don’t know much about. When Sky’s lead commentator Ewen Murray wondered why Charley Hoffman was wearing a green glove, Butch was able to tell him that Charley was sponsored by a waste management company.

You found yourself wondering whether Nike had been outbid in the battle for Hoffman, and been forced to sign McIlroy instead.

Next to Butch sat Colin Montgomerie, whose transition from player to TV pundit was the inevitable result of an entire career having an opinion about everything. The state of the economy, global warming, high speed railways, you name it. Slightly disappointingly, however, Monty now spends most of his time saying: “As you so rightly said there Butch/Bruce/Ewen….” and repeating what has just been said. Even when Butch says something hugely insightful like “wow!”, Monty comes straight back like an Alpine echo with a “wow!” of his own.

He also has a habit of repeating chunks of what he’s just said himself. “That putt, that putt there, it’s not just, not just fast, it’s like glass down that, down that slope.”

The one area he won’t play second fiddle to his American colleague is in the battle to see who can be the more sycophantic when Jack Nicklaus appears in the studio. They both take it in turns to say things like “Jack, it’s been an honour and a privilege….” etc, etc – I had to make this one a dead heat.

One big difference between Sky and the BBC, though, was in the special effects department. In the Sky studio we were regularly invited to join Monty or Butch up at the Skypad. When one of them pressed a button on the giant screen, it was like watching Captain Kirk order a change of course for Planet Klingon. Arrows flashed, statistics flew out of the screen, and a floating green suddenly appeared at the front of the stage for more button pressing and arrow pointing.

By way of contrast, the Beeb’s special effects budget, encouragingly for those of us concerned about the licence fee, appeared to have been the result of a cautious dip into a biscuit tin kept on the Director General’s desk.

And it mostly involved Ken Brown being filmed standing on a green, onto which he dropped a ball and watched it disappear 40 yards down a slope.

The Beeb also decided to dispense with the Starship Enterprise studio layout, and made do instead with a table. If they’d spent any money at all, it was on Alliss’ braces, which were considerably louder than anything inside Ian Poulter’s trouser wardrobe. He came across as the Augusta version of PG Wodehouse’s the Oldest Member, missing only the rocking chair, a whittling stick and jug of mint julep.

His delivery, though, remains as cosy as ever. His take on Spieth – “as my mother would say, he’s got a nice face” – wasn’t terribly enlightening, and Alliss’ aversion to doing homework was also evident in harking back to Paul Casey’s time in the wilderness. “He fell off a snowboard or something and did his leg or his shoulder or whatever, but I’ve always liked watching him.”

At 84, he’s entitled to the odd slip, such as calling the leader Gordon Spieth, and Dustin Johnson at one point became Dustin Hoffman. And he’s golf’s equivalent of Fred Trueman in the “I don’t understand what’s going off” stakes.

“Quite why they put the last day flags in positions where ordinary shots finish next to the hole I don’t get, but there you are,” he said on Sunday. But, as here, there’s usually a valid observation behind the gentle harrumph.

Of all the sideshow contests between Sky and the Beeb, none was harder fought than the battle to avoid calling the spectators ‘spectators’. Augusta retains the right to invoke the death sentence – or even worse, cancellation of TV rights – to anyone failing to refer to some loud-mouthed pot-bellied redneck with a large cigar as a “patron.”

Monty, to his credit, found this harder than most. “You see the crowd behind the, sorry, the patrons behind the green…” was one of many slips made to sound worse by the immediate correction, but it was Alliss’ probable successor, the excellent Andrew Cotter, who managed to both appease the green jackets and also poke fun at them at the same time.

When Spieth was in the trees at the 11th, and needed a space cleared, Cotter said: “There’s an enormous amount of patron moving going on here.” And while Sky, as always, offered the slicker coverage, Brown clinched the lighter touch award for the BBC by opting to illustrate some of the humps in the Augusta terrain with: “there’s a couple of Dolly Partons guarding the front of that green.”