Apologies for longness, you might want to give up now……
I approached this program hugely negatively; I hate the deal, how it was done, what it means for casual and avid viewers alike and that I believe it will be hugely detrimental to the long term health of the sport in the UK. For those reasons I want to hate this program and channel, but I’m trying to be fair to it and watch it for what it is.
First annoyance was a technical one, the lip sync was out for the first hour or so which drove me insane!
Lazenby and the pundits. I like most what they are saying but they don’t feel like a team, it doesn’t flow between them and just seems dull. I guess it will come with time, but it felt really forced to me. The fake set, the Jake-a-like ipad on the table (which clearly has no use, it’s not a live OB), Lazenbys ham acting ‘hmm that’s interesting’ face while the others are talking.
Ted, pretending to swipe at a screen to make a car graphic appear in front of him, then waving his arms around at something that isn’t there like a weathergirl. You can see on his face he thinks he looks like an absolute tool doing it, and unsurprisingly that results in him looking like a an uncomfortable tool. The graphic is slick though.
Pinkham annoys me but at least seems to know what see’s talking about and had rapport with Webber. The other girl talking at Button in some sort of leather dominatrix out fit is just sooo out of place, amazing where a pretty face will get you.
The biggest problem with ‘the full Sky Sports experience’ was present and correct as expected… We’ve got this coming up after the break…a few seconds clip of what was coming up….back from the break clip of this is coming up….to the sofa for an introduction of what it is that’s coming up, then we finally see the report that has been coming up for so long (and we’ve seen so many clips of it we’ve seen half of it.) Drives me mental, stop it! There were also too many repetitions of sections, like the calendar and promos of ‘legends’
Positives include the little intro and outro clips of stats and chats from usually unseen team members around the ad breaks. I hope there’s plenty of them and they don’t start coming round again too soon. Also a highlight was an underused Ant at the infuriatingly named ‘sky-pad’, with an unnecessary dolly standing next to him.
Overall the team needs trimming down, the girl who’s name I don’t know can go and I think the chat would work better with Ant and Damon leaving Brundle in the box and making features. The fact the two hour program was repeated an hour after it started also shows the glaring problem with this channel – a whole channel is just not required and in the long term is bound to be absorbed into standard Sky Sports (once it is too late for it to go back free to air, that is).
There was nothing much horrific about this program really, but also I fail to see what was so amazing. In fact many of the little segments (especially the pre credits and pre records) were very BBC in their production style and didn’t really give us anything we hadn’t seen before. To say F1 on the BBC is officially dead on the back of this program I find utterly bizarre, the real proof will be in the live races and I can see issues with the Sky commentary pairing. Only time will tell.
So I’m undecided. I intend to watch both for the first few races and take it from there, the most important factor I think will be the commentary. I want to stick with the BBC, I’ll see if I can get on with the highlights package and if not either jump across to Sky or just give up, both of which would make me incredibly sad.
