Hype and Cliche on Sports Channels? No, It's the News

What was your low point? Mine was when the reporter broadcasting live from a flooded West Country village announced she had just seen 'three huge fire engines' race past. Had they somehow caught the contagion of her overwrought commentary and swelled to twice their normal size?

Later that day, the instances of 'It's going to get worse before it gets better' went off the register.

More than ever it was a relief to turn over to watch some sport, hype and cliche's natural home, and, in particular, the Tour de France. This had the added attraction of reminding us that, yup, there is a huge ball of burning gas up there and it's only going to get hotter before it gets cooler.

Viewing the Tour live on Eurosport, a channel that some of us still regard as impossibly new age and see only when we visit other people's houses, it was hard to understand why it's not shown live on one of the main channels, where it would surely attract seven-figure audiences.

The mountain stages are sport at its most compelling: men riding up slopes so precipitous that many of us would be hard-pressed to walk up them for more than a few paces, and not just riding up them but racing up them - and knowing they will have to do it all again the next day and the day after that.

It is impossible to watch and not be staggered not only by the physical effort, but by the mental resilience that can be glimpsed through the blank, unblinking eyes.

All right, some/most of them are on drugs, which is wrong. But whatever they are popping or transfusing or injecting or pomading it's still amazing what they do day after day - and, anyway, the efforts by officials and the media to expose the drug cheats contribute to a storyline as enthralling as the race itself.

Some double: winning the world's toughest race and also finishing ahead of all those Clouseaus with their urine bottles, blood-testing kits and investigative reporting.

Do all the drug scandals this year mean the death of the Tour? Bah! Hype and cliche.

Unbelievably, considering the floods and huge fire engines, sport could be found going on as usual in Britain last week, including at Trent Bridge, where the second Test is being played. Cricket on TV has its own Clouseau - Hawkeye, the invention of the former minor-counties player Paul Hawkins that, among other things, investigates umpiring decisions.

Television embraces the Hawkeye graphics, and quite rightly so - because they are revealing and fun. But the cricket authorities fret and procrastinate over whether to give them official status, as Wimbledon did so successfully this year, regardless of Roger Federer's outburst. (Federer's hissy fit in the final was more to do with the pressure put on him by Rafael Nadal than the treachery of the technology.)

Cricket's daftest concern is that Hawkeye might give umpires too little to do, even make them redundant. This overlooks the fact that freeing umpires from the drudgery of deciding on dismissals would enable to control the game far more efficiently in other important areas while giving them far greater scope to develop their personalities. Dickie Bird did not become the television personality he did by sticking his finger up all day.

Will Buckley returns in two weeks