This drives me absolutely nuts. What is it with these TV3 executives who spend all that money on buying the rights to broadcast the V8 Supercar’s from Australia, only to manage to screw it up?

Did you know that motorsport is the most watched sport in the world? TV3 has paid more money for the rights to broadcast the Australian V8’s  for the next five years than has been paid for the rights to any sport in NZ other than rugby.  If you have never been able to bring yourself to watch it, you really are missing out on a fantastic experience. It is hard not to admire the skill and energy that goes into driving and running a Supercar team.  Not to mention the fact that there are 5 kiwi’s driving, four kiwi owned teams and the many thousands of kiwis who trek across to the Tasman to watch the racing every year.  There is a huge audience here.

Notwithstanding the fact that motorsport has, in this country, and continues to, produce world class athletes we can all be proud of.

All that aside, the coverage in New Zealand has been great up until this year when TV3 took over. They have put together a panel of hosts consisting of two radio announcers (who incidentally know nothing about motorsport) and Aaron Slight who, to be honest, is the only one worth listening too.  Then we cross over to their resident bimbo at the track for silly interview question time, which frankly makes TV3 look like a bunch of hillbillys from across the ditch.  Oh and did I mention we lose a substantial amount of racing due to the long ad breaks. They don’t show adverts during the rugby, they wait until half time.

Come on TV3, is this really as good as it gets?

Surely someone has told them how this works.  Surely they haven’t spent all that money and not consulted someone who knows what we want to see.   Their audience are intelligent, passionate and most definitely informed fans, they don’t like to be treated like idiots, like we are being with this coverage.   We certainly don’t want a couple of guys like Simon Doull telling us what he thinks, because we know he doesn’t know much about motor racing and then there is the other guy who said right up front "I know nothing about all this".  Great, in that case go back to radio.

Send Aaron to interview the drivers, at least he can ask intelligent questions that will make for better viewing, get a panel who knows something about motorsport and for goodness sake get rid of the female interviewer, she’s just plain annoying.

Sort it out TV3, it’s not that hard to get this right.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Men, Women. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.