It is unalloyed good news that live cricket is coming back to BBC television. One of the great national sports is reunited with the one broadcaster that can make big events bigger – and get the whole of the country talking about what they watch. The story of the falling-out between the England and Wales Cricket Board and the BBC feels, happily, to be in the far distant past.
It was two decades ago that live test cricket moved from the corporation to Channel 4 – which, by common consent, did an excellent job of covering the sport. And it was in 2004 that the whole of cricket was frogmarched behind a paywall, when Sky made a knockout offer for a deal which ran from 2006. Again, its coverage has been first-rate but it has simply not been accessible to a majority of the population. The ECB now deserves credit for an imaginative restructuring of its rights package.
The various squabbles that happened in my time as director of BBC Sport from 2005 – in which we were accused of not caring about cricket – were never going to resolve the relationship between the BBC and the rightsholder. The ECB’s business partnership was with Sky for the overwhelming majority of what it did, and we could never have afforded to get back into live Test cricket.
But it was easier for the ECB to bash us than to admit audiences and participation levels would fall (as they duly did) because of its decision to opt for pay TV. So we concentrated instead on the glories of radio’s Test Match Special and tried to build our online offering, with a few television add-ons such as Ashes and World Cup highlights.
I also used to note occasionally there had never quite been the golden age of cricket on the BBC that was sometimes claimed. People forget it used to be interrupted by horseracing and Wimbledon or by daytime scheduling commitments, and there was not a time when Test cricket was there in all its splendour. It is now unthinkable viewers would be denied a key wicket live but it used to happen all the time.
TV commissioners also never, in my experience, clamoured for its return. It went on for five days, rated fairly poorly in audience terms – unless you happened to hit on a classic Ashes series – and was always subject to rain, meaning further disruption to the schedule.
So that is why I suspect there is a much more positive attitude to the idea of Twenty20. It is more exciting, it is a much better fit with terrestrial TV scheduling and it has the potential to bring new and younger audiences to the sport. There is simply no better platform than the BBC for doing that. It still has by far the biggest reach not only for television but also through radio and online, and BBC Sport has become adept at bolstering its sports through a range of smart support-programming.
We used to get Top Gear to perform stunts like driving a car off a ski jump to mark the Winter Olympics, and for London 2012 it was almost impossible to switch on your TV without bumping into a drama or prom or documentary with an Olympic theme. Expect to have a much greater concentration on cricket in BBC weather forecasts too.
We should also celebrate that there seems to have been a bit of a shift in attitude to sport from the wider BBC. After BBC Sport moved to Salford it suffered a period of feeling marginalised. It was then repeatedly raided for funds – and disproportionately, according to insiders – by the corporate bean counters. It should have been supported to retain the Open golf, for instance, which will suffer an inevitable fall in its national status; and it managed to throw away an incredibly good value partnership between itself and Sky on Formula One.
Whatever you think about that sport, it brought in an underserved audience the BBC was at risk of losing from its portfolio – compounded by the end of BBC3 as a TV channel – in the preoccupation at that time with arts coverage and defending its heartlands. The director of sport, Barbara Slater, and her head of television sport, Philip Bernie, have fought a doughty battle to keep sport on the BBC’s agenda, and it is pleasing they have persuaded the Broadcasting House mandarins of their case.
But the main winners will be cricket and its audiences. This is the showcase the sport has lacked for too long. It still depends, of course, on whether the new franchise-competition formats work. But if they do, cricket can hope to have viewing figures it has not seen since its Channel 4 days – and an injection of energy instead of the threat of gentle decline.
Roger Mosey is Master of Selwyn College Cambridge and a former director of BBC Sport
