King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Canadian football goes announcerless on TV and viewers don't mind at all. Could this be the golden, silent future? Nah, but we can dream.
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Aug. 24, 2005 | The CBC television network is showing Canadian Football League games without announcers.
It's not some bold experiment, the way a similar move by NBC was 25 years ago. It's the CBC reacting to a bad situation it created itself when it locked out 5,500 camera operators, directors and announcers who are members of the Canadian Media Guild.
Still, a good idea is a good idea, even if it happens by accident.
The network says complaints were minimal and ratings were strong last weekend for the first announcerless game, the Toronto Argonauts at the Edmonton Eskimos, though the Canadian Press reported that a blind lawyer filed a complaint with the national broadcasting regulator over the CBC's failure to provide commentary.
The CBC says it'll go without announcers again this weekend. The network is trying to sell the format as "the stadium experience from home," since it's replacing the commentators with boosted stadium sound levels. There were some complaints that the public-address announcer was difficult to hear on TV, among other minor problems.
With technicians walking the picket lines, managers worked the cameras, microphones and other equipment last week, with predictably amateurish results, according to press reports. The network says it hopes to improve those areas this week, but it will probably fail. You don't learn the nuts and bolts of broadcasting in a few days.
But ignoring the labor issues -- here's a good Montreal Gazette story that lays them out -- let's talk about no talking.
As much as we all love to talk about who should be the announcer for this or that broadcast and how good or bad various announcers are, I've long maintained that announcers don't mean much to fans.
We're used to having them there, so not having them is something that would take some getting used to. A game with stadium or arena noise and no announcers just sounds kind of awkward to ears trained to either listen to or selectively tune out the omnipresent chatter that's accompanied action since the medium was new.
And make no mistake: We'll never have the chance to get used to such a thing. Announcers aren't there to provide insight and analysis or to identify players and describe action. They're required to do all those things, and we judge them on how well they do them.
But their primary purpose is to read promos. The networks and sponsors aren't giving that up. We're stuck with announcers for as long as we're stuck with money.
