I KNOW it’s always easier to knock something down rather than praise it (unless you’re Mal Meninga).
But why is the greatest game served by such average television?
Boots ‘n’ All manages to make the Super League show look like the most professional thing on the box since, well, The Professionals .
But that doesn’t mean to say the programme isn’t just all a bit naff.
Starting with the opening credits where that famous Hull KR player Paul Cooke is seen picking out his winger with one of those trademark 30-yard bullet passes.
Great, except he’s playing for former club Hull. That immediately dates the whole show.
It’s a bit like those betting shop windows still showing Alan Shearer in his Blackburn Rovers kit alongside Andre Agassi and his bad mullet.
Then Harry Gration appears in his atrocious leisure wear. On atrocious furniture.
Last Sunday/Monday’s recording (does anyone stay up to watch it?) had uncle Harry in a bright pink pullover with matching socks that had gone a bit dark in the wash.
Last night/this morning he was wearing a golf jumper his blind aunt bought him for Christmas.
Wikipedia says Harry has been married three times so he might have a few of them (aunts and pullovers).
There’s the bizarre bit where he makes Robbie Paul – a shining light in the gloom every week – hoist himself up to chat on a bar stool from a 1980s MFI showroom.
They then talk down to the studio guest who’s lounging uncomfortably on the leather sofa 300 yards away.
In the latest programme it was the ever likeable Tony Smith dressing only as an Australian can. Only an Aussie can make an untucked shirt look like an accident.
There are the voiceovers from the woman who sounds like a man and the man who sounds like a woman. It could just be a woman who sounds like a woman and a man who sounds like a man I suppose.
And the choice of music. On the latest show while English and Welsh youngsters leathered into each other the whimpering disco throb of Antony Johnson played in the background.
Antony, Danny Cipriani tells me, is a cross-dresser (or he could just be an Australian) and probably the campest man in New York. That’s fine but a bit weird music for RL.
After all that it’s still better than Sky’s plodders but as with all reports on RL media..could do better.
Sympathetic programming would help. Being granted a regular time slot from the suits for a starter.
And why not move it to a Monday night slot? If you don’t live up north and have to catch the replay it’s embarrassing seeing out-of-date league tables after Sunday games.
But all that’s a bit too obvious and rugby league has never been too clever addressing things like that.