Broadcast Rage

Broadcast Rage - great anger caused by the idiotic decisions and mistakes of television companies.

Some recent examples are Nine stretching out the last six episodes of Friends over six months, Nine first moving West Wing to 10:30 and then not showing it at all so far this year, and the "Club Lime" ad that came on during play in the World Cup semi between Australia and NZ.

I had another such experience on Sunday when watching the marathon. They showed the first 15 minutes of the race, but then they cut to a replay of a Greek winning gold in the women's discus! And this wasn't just a quick replay, they showed replays of her throws, the medal ceremony, an interview with the athlete and then an interview with her coach! I was absolutely livid. Especially as it was quite clear that this was going to happen throughout the race. This proved to be correct as they proceeded to show extended highlights of the other three Greek athletics medal winners, plus - apparently just for the hell of it - the womens 100m final. This was of course on top of the 3 or 4 ad breaks. So naturally I missed seeing the major point of the race, when the nutter grabbed the leading Brazilian runner and held him for 20-30 seconds (they showed a replay upon returning).

Ads during the race are annoying but I do understand that the TV station is a business and they need to make their money somewhere. But showing the replays was something else. The 400m hurdles race had already been shown about 30 times, and will probably be shown another 30 times over the next month, so why did they have to show it during the marathon? The other channel was showing uninterrupted coverage of Taekwondo followed by the Water Polo final, why couldn't they have put it on there? I know a lot of people find the marathon really boring, but this was The Marathon over the original route, I would have thought it could have been given more respect.