NASN – the North American Sports Network – has recently been added to the Telewest Digital universe, and I believe we’re getting it free on a temporary basis before they attempt to charge me a tenner a month.
In the meantime, I’m dosing up on baseball and the like. I could go off on a rant about American sport at this point, but it’d be somehow very disingenuous of me.
But there’s another aspect of American sports telly that I hadn’t really come across before – the sports talk discussion programmes.
Now maybe it’s because I listen to Radio 5 rather than Talksport, and I know that my very own employer has Rock n Roll Football, but wow. All the US discussion programmes have only people who shout.
There are a couple of programmes on daily, and maybe just maybe, we’re missing out on the cream of the crop. There’s Around the Horn, which seems to be presented as a gameshow with different pundits scoring points for their opinions as they shout off amongst one another, and also Pardon the Interruption in which two presenters shout off amongst one another. From what I can tell from ESPN’s confusing listings at MSN, the two shows follow one another at 5.00pm and 5.30pm.
Given that nearly all the participants are newspapers sports journalists, one would have thought that they were on deadline around this time, but what do I know.
It’s always fascinating tp catch these shows to see the minutae of detail on dull American sports covered way ahead of what the rest of the world would be interested in. Lance Armstrong winning Le Tour for a fifth time was relegated way down the list that weekend.
Anyway – baseball in the mid evening’s great.