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Sky Sports Monday Night Football and the Brokeback Mountain factor

by Clive Whittingham

As my cinema attendance has increased with my age and interest in films I have often marvelled at the different audience reaction you get to films.

I love the stories of American cinemas where you can see film lovers shuffling into darkened rooms at 8am clutching tubs of butter popcorn as big as their 4x4 and carton of Cola the same shape and size as their bulbous thigh. It all seemed a world away from the Odeon in Leicester Square where I took in one of the final showings of Zombieland accompanied only by my girlfriend, a Daily Mail hack writing a feature on the downfall of society thanks to violent films and black people and an old man of about 80 who was quickly whisked out of his seat and away down the steps by a worried looking daughter who felt sure he’d gone into the wrong screen when the first brain exploded in slow motion through the nose of one of the extras.

It’s those American audiences that you see in the new film trailers. You know the ones, the booming voiceover grumbling something along the lines of “critics have called it the scariest movie of all time” while snap shot clips of Americans sitting in a dark room (possibly a cinema but equally likely a studio set up for the filming of the trailer) jumping, screaming and shouting at characters not to go up the stairs, or to go up the stairs, or to basically do the opposite of whatever the hell they’re about to do, quickly flick by.

British cinema goers are usually much more refined and fit neatly into two categories – those that go with a group of mates with the sole intention of laughing, joking, throwing bits of food around and generally being a complete pain in the arse for the duration of the film; and those who spend the entire length of the film casting angry glances and other such meagre attempts at discipline and complaint that only serve to attract a further hale of chocolate raisins or whatever else ended up in the pick and mix despite nobody liking it very much from the aforementioned pains in the arse.

Going to the cinema in Sheffield, as I have been doing for the last ten years as continued payment for a mirror I broke some time ago, is much the same as going anywhere else in the UK, only with that added element that only comes when you’re in the north of England. For instance people in Sheffield will arrive with a big tub of pop corn like everybody else, but after demolishing three quarters of it before the trailers and adverts have even finished they’re liable to sit back in the chair, release some slack from their belt buckle and declare rather too loudly “well mother, we shall not be having intercourse after this.”

And where the American audiences scream and gasp and cry out with fear and terror the most reaction you’ll get to even the scariest scene in a film is the odd “chuffin norah” from a middle aged bald man in the row behind you. Although, admittedly, he did exclaim it while jumping up and kicking the back of my chair. And this just half an hour after he’d made no secret of his scepticism of the concept of Paranormal Activity by loudly declaring “my arse” when Paramount Pictures thanked the family’s of Kate and Micah and the San Diego Police Department for “releasing the footage” to them. Pride comes before you shit your pants, as I believe the saying goes.

Few reactions in a cinema have ever been as memorable as the moment in Brokeback Mountain when Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal decide that a spot of rectum raiding was in order to try and keep warm high on the hills in the middle of the night. Watching those same middle aged Sheffield men who believed they’d come to see an old style cowboy film squirm in their seats, and in several cases walk out, as Jake and Heath stared into each other’s eyes and decided who would give and who would receive without speaking a word was cringe worthy and side splittingly hilarious at the same time.

Brokeback Mountain made money - lots of money – as one bored housewife after another suggested a trip to the pictures for a cowboy film to her long suffering husband just for the pure hilarity of that moment. And where there’s money there are sequels, and copy cats, and spoofs. You will now find at your local picture house Paranormal Activity 2 and Vampires Suck – good ideas appealing to large audiences, milked for all their worth in a variety of ways. Brokeback Mountain has led to scores of films where guys go on road trips, or challenges, or quests, and don’t quite get down to the actual loading of the single barrelled, pump action yoghurt riffles but like to give the impression they might do when the cameras stop rolling.

And so, rather belatedly, that brings me onto the return of Sky’s Monday Night Football – three hours of testosterone filled homo eroticism between two middle aged men wearing makeup, interspersed with action from what is usually the worst of the weekend’s Premiership fixture list. If there’s a bandwagon to be jumped on, Sky are always there first in line.

Sky happily bump games like Blackburn v Sunderland or Stoke v Villa or Blackpool v West Brom back 48 hours to fulfil their quota of showing every team a set number of times no matter how awful they are - safe in the knowledge that nobody will watch and the few that would have cared enough to be there on the Saturday will simply troop down to the coliseum on Monday instead.

The Monday Night Football is an idea, like so many of Sky’s, that was done first in America with the NFL. When you only have 16 regular weeks of action plus play offs spread over just five months it’s important to maximise your product and so a single round of NFL fixtures is spread right across the television schedules from late Thursday night through the Saturday night double header, the Sunday afternoon triple header, and then Monday night. The first televised Monday Night Football in this country was, beginning a tradition of picking an odd fixture that few people give that much of a toss about to show at the start of the week, Manchester City v QPR in 1992. David White scored for City, Andy Sinton for QPR, and there were cheerleaders on the pitch at half time with a live band. From that point on I always got the sense that the football was in fact the least important part of the Monday Night Football.

Of course in America there are a host of broadcasters with rights to show NFL games. You may watch the Saturday night game between the Redskins and the Packers on CBS, then switch over to Fox for the Saints and the Chargers on Sunday, and then it’s the Dolphins and the Colts on ESPN on Monday night. On the odd occasions the competition commission or European Union have poked their head round the door to ask why Sky have all the football they have pacified them by bumming the Monday Night Football off onto whatever Johnny Come Lately has been set up in “competition”. I use quotation marks there because that’s what the EU calls it – personally I’m not sure how making Sky offload 80 games a year onto another channel that you can only really get through their platform, by paying an extra tenner a month, is either competition or good for the viewer but there you go. When that has happened in the past Sky have quickly signed up some mediocre Championship football to schedule against the mediocre Premiership football, splitting the sad bastards that watch this sort of thing on a Monday night (guilty, and I’d do it again your honour) straight down the middle and ensuring that the likes of Setanta and, inevitably, ESPN measure their lifespan in months rather than years.

But this year the Monday Night Football is back, bigger and camper than ever before.

As time has gone by Sky have gone away from the dancing girls and moved more towards gadgets – credit them with knowing their audience at least. Monday nights on Sky have, for as long as I can really remember, been about Andy Gray pushing buttons, pulling levers, flicking switches, drawing lines on the screen and generally tying himself in knots proving that Sunderland’s first goal at the weekend was actually half a yard offside.

This famously annoyed Ron Atkinson after a Monday night clash between Southampton and Coventry at The Dell (dear God they really do pick some shockers for that time slot don’t they?) where he felt rather aggrieved firstly that Coventry had lost against the run of play and secondly that Gray and Keys were giving him a bit of a hard time about that. “Stick your silly machines up your arse” he said, or words to that effect, before slinging his head set at a nearby cameraman who he then profusely apologised to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EhkVgzR8bU

The same three problems have always dogged this format of Gray and Keys analysing every kick of every ball on a variety of computers and machines. Firstly there is that unshakable feeling that Gray actually has little to do with the images we’re seeing on the screen. We see him pushing the tape in, and toggling the levers, and pointing the arrows, but you’d have to be naïve to think there aren’t some very busy people sitting a mixing desk just off camera sorting all this out for him and playing the clips on cue.

There was the infamous Fantasy Football League sketch where Gray pops in a tape of Everton 0 Bolton 0 only for a Swedish porn video to appear on the screen. Incidentally is it only me that remembers Fantasy Football League being repeated on a Sunday morning at a watershed busting 11am back in the day – Jurgeon Klinsman in the German cheese factory and all? Maybe it was just in my house where my dad was prone to putting such things on tape and then showing them to his then seven or eight year old son just to wind my mum up. How I remember her delight when I told her we’d watched Rita, Sue and Bob Too while she was out at parents evening. Anyway my dad, and probably everybody else in the country, sat there and shouted “he’s not bloody doing that” whenever Gray reached for the video tape and that remains the case today. It’s just hard to imagine that man with the wild hair that used to storm around the pitch for Wolves, Villa and Everton operating the increasingly high tech machines Sky have in front of him these days. This is a man that could scarcely get out of bed without rupturing his cruciate ligaments for goodness sake.

Secondly Gray has had his chance to prove that he really knows what he’s talking about in the past and turned it down. Everton wanted him as their manager in the mid 90s and he decided to stay in the television studio – probably well aware that his lucrative media career would have been damaged had he, like everybody else at Everton in the mid 90s, made a pig’s ear of it. Ron Atkinson’s barbed comment about “I’m actually the manager of a football club” says it all. When it all boils down to it who is Andy Gray to tell Arsene Wenger, Alex Ferguson, or even Tony Pulis their job?

And I like Andy Gray. Despite his best attempts to become a parody of himself with his insistence on shouting “you don’t save those” and “take a bow son” every three minutes he is still the best pundit out there – simply because he provides both analysis and opinion. When you think about it those are the two things you want from your expert co-commentator and only Alan Hanson comes close to doing both to the same standard as Gray – and he’s not very close.

And thirdly Richard Keys is a tosser.

Despite all of this the Monday Night Football is a treat. Just when you think the farce cannot deepen any more it does. Credit to the pair of them, on the night I tuned in Blackburn drew 0-0 with Sunderland in the kind of game that sends you scurrying for the gas oven suicide note in hand only to find a queue of people waiting in the kitchen to do exactly the same thing. They managed to get three hours of programming out of that – admittedly, and sadly, including 90 minutes of the “action” with Kevin Phillips co-commentating on the HD channel and Gary Birtles on the 3D version which is a bit like choosing between syphilis and Chlamydia – but by God they worked hard for that.

When they talk about great moments of television and cue up clips of Del Boy falling through the bar or David Attenburgh rolling round in the bracken with a gorilla I hope to God in future the montages include Gray’s answer to Keys’ simple question about ‘what has happened to the art of tackling?’ Clips, arrows, archive footage, opinion and finally, gloriously, a small piece of artificial grass stolen from Kenilworth Road circa 1990 upon which Gray delicately placed Keys, took a large run up, and proceeded to demonstrate the rights and wrongs of the sliding tackle. Why was I not in the production meeting when the idea of some artificial turf for Richard and Andy to stand on and demonstrate shooting, passing and breaking Bobby Zamora’s leg was suggested? When that suggestion found enough support to make it onto my television every Monday night I feel I should have been present. What a moment.

Dancing girls, Andy Sinton, and an angry Big Ron pale into insignificance when compared with Andy Gray executing a tackle on Richard Keys in a television studio on a teeny tiny patch of artificial grass. I find myself watching it again on my Sky Plus box late at night, crying at the sheer perfection of it. A thousand sit com writers could try for a thousand years and never come close.

It’s Sunderland v Everton this week, possibly. But more importantly it’s Richard and Andy playing with their toys – partners, lovers, geniuses.

Sky Sports Monday Night Football and the Brokeback Mountain factor

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