Congratulations Vancouver!
What a spectacular opening ceremony you put on for the Winter Olympics.
This has nothing to do with life in France, other than that fact that I’m IN France!
I have to say that watching the Olympics this year is a totally different experience for me. I KNOW there were games in 2006, but for some reason we didn’t see much of those. My guess is that whatever time they were on conflicted with other things that we wanted to see more, so we just never watched.
This year it is working out great though. The BBC (I haven’t looked at the French schedule, because we can’t record them) is running them live. That pretty much means most events are on after 1 am our time. That is not in conflict with anything we would normally record, so we just fake-Tivo them.
There are some amazing benefits to doing it this way. First, with the BBC there are NO commercials. That means that the “big” events get shown almost entirely uninterrupted. We had gotten used to the jingoistic American network coverage that meant you would see the winning competitors and the Americans. You almost never got to see any other “unimportant” countries.
That annoyed me; if I want to watch something, I want to watch it. I’m sure we won’t see ALL the competitors for the figure skating, etc., but I’m sure we’ll see more than the top 4 or 5.
Also irritating was the “America is no. 1″ hype of the commentators. It was really irritating and insulting to all the other countries. The BBC seems to have, so far, done less than that. Although generally, all sports commentary bores the socks off of me.
The best thing about watching it later in the day on the fake-Tivo though, is that I can fast forward through the stuff I don’t want to see to get to what I do want to see. My Canadian friends have assured me that Curling is really a complicated sport, but, seriously, I’d rather watch paint dry!
I’m looking forward to watching more than I have in years, and I will be truly looking forward to the Closing Ceremony, because if they are as good as Friday night’s, they will be outstanding.
Ciao for now.
Randy
There may be more snow in Chalabre than at Whistler, given the reports.
Can’t imagine how you can watch the Olympics without the deep, insightful, jingoistic commentary of the network talking heads. Think what you’re missing. /snark
Wish I could watch it on the BBC instead.
1Me too, us too, that is — wish we could watch anybody else’s but Amur’cn coverage!
In ancient days, back in the dawn of cable here in Oregon we could actually get some Vancouver BC station (& Seattle, & San Francisco, here in Eugene), so I’ve experienced Canadian coverage (albeit so long ago I don’t actually remember any of it, 8-); and my husband grew up with it (he’s Canadian).
Or even American coverage the way it was 20-30 years ago — before the networks decided that the way to interest the Amur’cn WOMAN viewer was to start creating a bunch of soupy, schmaltzy “human interest” soap opera stories about individual athletes, which would attract the dimbulb “emotional” viewer; that they could insert into the coverage… instead of ACTUALLY covering the boring old sports parts! I’d rather just ignore the parts I’m not interested in (like hockey), and see more of what we ARE interested in — although I think we’re going to get -plenty- of curling coverage, we DO like that, we’ve found, 8-).
2I’m with you both. Those human interest stories are just NOT that interesting, are they? Okay, yeah, they overcame hardships to get there, but that’s not really why we watch!
3I’ve watched sports TV in other countries too and really believe that the BBC is least partial. However you need to remember that when it comes to winter sport, although many of us love to take part, we’re not very good at it so if the BBC only showed UK winners there’d be no coverage!!
4To be fair, we mostly watch the ice skating, and you are good at that.
One of the things that really struck us was that the conversation between the commentators is kept to a minimum and is ALL about the skating. How refreshing that was.
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