Giants: they’re so hot right now. O2 started it with its (really rather charming) animated advert, where Chris Robshaw and the rest of the England team are transformed into the size of tower blocks by the support of their countrymen. “Make them Giants: Wear the Rose,” we’re told. It’s a novel way getting people to spend £60 on a replica shirt; from the TV shots of the Twickenham crowd on Friday night, it seems to be working.
Now there seem to be Goliaths everywhere you look. Mamuka Gorgodze of Georgia. Nemani Nadolo of Fiji. ITV has picked up the theme and run with it like Jonah Lomu tenderising an Underwood.
John Inverdale, priming us for seven weeks of rugby, shambled along an outsized corridor with the look of a Hobbit who’d been thrown out of the Shire for louche behaviour. The channel’s studio pundits, Clive Woodward, Jonny Wilkinson and Lawrence Dallaglio, were introduced as “giants of the England game” and the channel even has its own bona fide Hagrid: Martin Bayfield, who was Robbie Coltrane’s body double in Harry Potter.
From the amount of screen time Bayfield is getting, it looks like the ITV directors are working him harder than Chris Columbus did. He was all over, from the pre-match interviews – looming above François Pienaar, while poor Jason Robinson was forced to commune with his belly button – to the ITV’s charity appeal, lending his sympathetic policeman’s face to a message about the UN’s world food programme. There’s something oddly serendipitous about a man who looks like he breakfasts on small deer asking for your help to tackle hunger.
He also had to do the post-match interviews, a job well suited to his unassuming and rather soothing charm. Unfortunately, his off-camera presence also meant that even the taller England players answered their questions as if tracking a passing aeroplane and Stuart Lancaster looked like he was talking to God. Someone is going to have dig Bayfield a trench to stand in before the end of each game.
On Saturday, the problem was reversed as the colossal Paul O’Connell was forced to double over and duck his head so that Jill Douglas’s questions could reach his ear. The first full day of the tournament kicked off with four-back to-back games, which meant Saturday was a marathon day in front of the telly. The games were supposed to be too unevenly matched to offer any upsets, but Georgia and Japan had something to say about that. Away from the action there was plenty of entertainment and intrigue to be had.
For instance, who is that mysterious orangutan who keeps appearing on our screens? What’s he thinking, as he climbs the H bar and looks out over the empty stadium? Are his intentions friendly? Sure, at the moment he seems placid enough. But we’ve got seven weeks to go and who knows how many Planet of the Apes films he’s seen.
At the start of a World Cup everything is a delightful novelty, including Paloma Faith’s gurgling vowels as she sings over the opening credits. It’s hard to work out which is more impressive – the number of syllables she manages to smuggle in to the phrase “wer-urld in unee-er-on”, or that she seems to make an appearance in the scrum, hooking the ball back with her high heel.
It’s good to see the rather unsung Robshaw having his moment. For a man who’s probably England’s least recognisable sporting captain, he is doing a sterling job in the ad breaks to raise his profile. He’s backing several brands at the moment, from headphones to Lucozade, although his O2 anime version has a lot more natural charisma, and is more likely to get future bookings.
Hardworking as Robshaw is, he’ll have to go a long way to beat Bayfield. Here he was again, at Penny Hill Park, the morning after England’s match. He’d followed the team back there at 2am so he could exclusively report that a few sleepless players had headed to the cryotherapy chamber for a recovery session in the early hours. He stood in the front of the camera with 11 o’clock shadow and the patience of Prometheus chained to his rock. The BFG of ITV.
