Sport on TV: Crashing bores and Caribbean flaws

WE'RE half-way through the Winter Games now (Olympic Grandstand, all week) and the BBC's coverage thus far has been sumptuous, wide-ranging, beautifully shot, lovingly produced. I don't know about you, but I'm bored stiff.

This is terribly ungrateful, I know. Large numbers of highly trained professionals and David Coleman have gone to enormous lengths (and great heights) to bring back these pictures of people in rubber suits, crossing man-made ice floes by high-speed tea-tray. But to the untrained eye, one person's slide or glide down or round the slope or rink looks pretty much like the next person's, at least until one of them crashes. The ice hockey is a different ball- game, as it were, but exciting though it is, I can't help feeling my pleasure would be enlarged if I could actually spot the puck from time to time.

You could tell from the mass of repeats they gave Thursday's skating pile-up (one racer flailing into the outside lane on her stomach, wrapping herself round another's shins, both of them plunging into the tarpaulin surround - excellent) that someone in charge of the coverage was feeling the pressure too. This is a spectacle in search of the spectacular.

Which is why Sky Sports' West Indies v England coverage (One Day International Cricket, Wednesday), live from the warm Caribbean, should have been a sunnier prospect. Not a ski or a skate in sight: the puck stops here. I'm bored by cricket too, but that's partly the point of it - its sedative pace, the time it buys you to think about other things, the way the drama of the game wells up slowly and gradually draws you under. Unfortunately, this only means it's the worst possible game for Sky to get its hands on. Sky casually mangles almost any sport it buys an interest in, but what the channel does to cricket barely admits description. It wants it to be like ice hockey or a particularly crash- ridden round of speed skating. And it's not; it's cricket.

The Sky people are seriously worried about boring us - lavishly worried. You might not think so from their choice of commentators: whatever David 'adrenalin' Gower and Bob 'the gag-meister' Willis have consulted for inspiration, it doesn't appear to be old videos of The Two Ronnies. But in all other respects, it's almost touching how concerned Sky is about keeping us entertained.

It's so keen that when a batsman gets out for a duck (like Phil Simmons did on Wednesday), that little cartoon duck in a little Sky T-shirt waddles into view at the bottom of the screen. And it puts its little cartoon fingers in the shape of a little pistol up to its temples and its big cartoon eyes go all dewy with cartoon dismay. It's as if the viewer is the baby and Sky is the eager parent, leaning into the pram saying, 'Look] Look] See the little ducky?' I was nearly sick on my bib.

Commercial breaks come at the end of every over, and they come directly after wickets. It's a long, lonely walk back to the pavilion, but you won't see it on Sky. If the producers could only persuade Devon Malcolm to extend his run-up slightly, they could squeeze in a quick Guinness plug between his setting off and his delivering.

But then, every channel has to pay its way. What's more destructive is the fidgety editing within the game itself. In cricket, the boring bits count. When the ball is being tossed about in the field, when the bowler is walking back to his mark, rubbing up the ball, when he turns to start his run-up, that's where the character of the game takes shape. But for Sky's producers, this is dead time, this is panic- inducing, this is where we have to cut to the crowd and find someone in a silly hat or a small top, or a kid with an ice-cream, or some dumb Union Jack banner marked 'Watford'.

Only then can we look back to the pitch, where the bowler will be just two steps from the crease. This is the game reduced to crude essentials, presumably on the grounds that the slightest inaction will lose our interest. If we really were as stupid as Sky Sports makes us out to be, few of us would be able to find our own homes at the end of the day.

You could always, of course, allow the game to breathe slightly by turning the sound down and tuning in to the non-stop radio commentary. Except that, at 7.30pm on Wednesday, with the West Indies a handful of wickets down and England (good grief) chasing victory, Radio 5 opted - quality editing decision, this - to switch to Tranmere v Aston Villa, the Coca-Cola Cup semi- final, first leg. We eventually went back, presumably because calls of complaint threatened a meltdown in the switchboard room, but it was a chilling moment: cricket-watchers were wholly at Sky's mercy.

And now the full-length Tests are under way and suddenly that women's 10km freestyle pursuit cross-country skiing final over on BBC 2 looks strangely attractive. Five full days of cricket on Sky? In the words of one of the car advertisements you'll see a lot of if you tune in: 'Sorry but I'm going to have to pass.'