Lets Kick Some Balls! World Cup 2010 Post

So, The World Cup just happened.

The most amazing thing about the world cup is that it somehow manages to make advertising even worse than normal. There seem to be 2 types of adverts at the moment.
The first are the ones that have tried hard(although you probably wouldn’t notice the effort from the product) to make what they are selling seem relevent to the football. The rest can’t be bothered to think too hard about it and just go ahead and stick a football in at some point, e.g. the British Gas advert.
The logic of it all doesn’t make sense to me. Anyone who is going to be drawn to an advert just because they’ve included an object which will no doubt be a main feature of every broadcast for the world cup period, will probably not be able to find their way out of the house in order to make the purchase.

"ermmmmmm, nice pass"

The adverts are over …the program starts and I’m hit with the most irritating sound ever, football commentary.
Footballers have very little to offer the world, and most of that “little” is taken up with playing football, so why anyone thought it was a good idea to give retired footballers a job trying to entertain people for an hour and a half just by speaking is beyond me. But atleast they do their research, otherwise there would be no ridiculous facts, like “This is the first time someone from England has scored in the first 18 minutes of a match whilst shooting East, in an evening game, for 20 years!”, The teams they refer to will have changed constantly within the timeframes and so the facts are irrelevant.
I think they should start giving out more interesting facts, like how many pencils they can fit in Guy Mowbry’s mouth before he stops talking rubbish.
It makes me miss the ridiculously bad commentary from football computer games.

If the commentary is a gripe then the editing is a full blown emergency. The editor seems to confuse his job to show the viewer what is happening on the field, with showing a close up of everybody in the stadium. Sometimes it’s a random person, but on occasion it will be a person of “interest”, this means the commentators are then obliged to say something about this person, and as I may have pointed out, they barely master the skill of talking, improvising is slightly out of their league. Plus, if the football is not interesting enough to show at that point, the person in the shot is usually bored too, so we end up with a close up of someone with a bored expression on their face, now THAT’s entertainment.

"Oh wow! did you see that? No you didn't cos you're looking at our dumb arses"

My biggest frustration is that I just want to see what’s happening in the game, that is the drama I tuned into see. I can put up with the cut-aways when the ball has just gone out of play, but cutting back to football that has already restarted, really bugs me. The same with the angles from the side line while the ball is in play, it obstructs the view of the game, just save it for the replays wont you?
The final moan is the new Super Duper Slow Motion shots, again, brilliant for replays, but I can’t help but feel sorry for the players as I’m sure they didn’t sign any releases that allows the broadcasters to show them in such ridiculous convulsions.

The benefits of the TV production of football now is that it shows how quickly the decisions of offside, ball over goal line, and probably even some fouls can be reviewed. This should help bring football and FIFA into the 21st century, I mean even cricket has techno-help with its decisions and they are so old and traditional they still break for tea.

Okay so considering this is normally a TV Drama blog, lets review the drama of the world cup:
So it started off well, the plot lines were easy to decipher and the goal for the characters was clear and so it was easy to get into. The action of the first few episodes was reasonably withdrawn, with quite low scoring matches, but the drama was rife with plenty of twists (such as Switzerland taking down the soon-to-be victors Spain) which made it interesting. I was dissapointed that the character that I liked initially (England) turned out to be not quite as good as I thought, and turned into a bit of a self-obsessed loseWeight Exerciser.
The action picked up later into the first round, with some brilliant goals, but there was really too many plot lines going on that it was hard to stay fully interested. The series was plagued from terrible over-acting from start to finish, and although critics regularly brought up this point the producers seemed to take no action.
The series did not over-excite, not because of the lack of good characters, Ghana were fan-magnets and almost survived the full series, but it was simply not exceptional, its something we’ve all seen before. However, the ending was not predictable and kept people guessing up until the close of the show, and although the finale failed to produce the exciting final farewell the series was looking for the outcome was reasonable, and would not make fans unhappy.
I would have to say the star of the show, which will be remembered by all who watched was the Vuvuzela, it was the only real thing through out the world cup which really blew me away…