Over the years, Patrice has learned many tricks to generate atmosphere. He carries two things with him at all times. A rubber red nose and a Super Soaker water pistol. Want smiling kids? Any TV director does. Problem is, the expectant fans have been waiting for hours in the baking sun and are a bit tired and fed up. Then Patrice arrives. His big round friendly sunburnt face naturally raises a smile anyway. He winks and twists the ends of his luxurious moustache before adding the touch of the red nose.
The crowd are now amused, but the shot is still not at peak jollity. Time for the coup de grâce: out comes the Super Soaker. ‘Allez!’ screams Patrice and starts blasting the crowd with water. It’s mayhem! The perfect warm-up act has done his job. The cameraman gets a load of geed-up fans in the sunshine and, right on cue, he pulls back to get the riders approaching. Without our friend Patrice, none of this would have happened. Good TV pictures take work. Sometimes they are fraught with danger. The best in the business make generating such images as this look easy. It is not. Ride long and safe, Patrice. We need you.
‘That’s the Danish bringing home the bacon.’
23
When the Plug Gets Pulled
The quality of images from bike races broadcast into homes all over the world has improved dramatically in recent years. When you look back at old footage from 15 and 20 years ago, it was beset with pictures breaking up – and, at times, it was very difficult to make out who the riders were. I remember having to commentate from the back of a van with a towel over my head and a black and white monitor while I tried to decipher who the riders were from their posture because I couldn’t even make out the colours of their team kit. While we’re blessed by great improvements in technology that offer pin sharp images, even cameras attached to the riders’ bikes, there are times that I can’t stop marvelling at how it all comes together. Occasionally it doesn’t.
The process involved in delivering live cycling on TV is a complex one, and it takes only a small error for the whole show to come crashing down around your ears. The pictures on your TV set at home, whether from a motorbike, a helicopter or static camera by the side of the road, have to go a circuitous route of being pinged up to a circling fixed-wing aircraft and sent back down to the outside broadcast vehicle. This truck sends the signal to a hub-transmission facility in, say, Paris if we are on the Tour. This is then sent via satellite to your provider, who mixes in commentary and retransmits the signal to its own network via either cable, internet or satellite and thus into your home. One tiny error, the smallest slip-up, will put paid to all the hard work of engineers, cameramen, directors, helicopter pilots and producers. When the live pictures fail, there is usually a play-loop of general pictures until the link is fixed. And at a moment such as this it’s up to the commentator to try and plug the gap.
Remember the dream you had about standing naked in the middle of the Wembley pitch on Cup Final day? Yep, that’s the feeling.
I was on the Tirreno Adriatico in 2013 where Lloydie and I were voicing the world feed, as opposed to the feed from Eurosport. Before transmission, we were inadvertently filmed for filler by a cameraman who didn’t know us. We were having a spot of lunch – calamari and a glass of prosecco, I think it was. Dan and I had been joined by two colleagues: Valentina Lualdi from the organisers, RCS, and Sophie Ormond of IMG, the managing agents. We would have looked to the cameraman like a perfect pairing of two couples out for lunch in the sunshine (had I not spoiled the effect by looking like their Dad).
Anyway, it was a bit of atmos footage, shot purely as filler to set the scene at the finish line. Unbeknown to us, our guzzling faces were shortly to appear on the Eurosport broadcast, and not just a fleeting glimpse either. We were on a three-minute loop that was shown again, and again, and again. The line had failed and the only fill-in footage they had was our little luncheon.
The problem began a few hours earlier, when the broadcast technicians had set up the satellite dish that was to beam the pictures of the race to the world. The truck had been lined up and secured, the dish had been angled correctly, and Sergio and Giuseppe had dusted their hands and disappeared to the local bar to congratulate themselves on a job well done. Only, they hadn’t done the job at all well. While they’d remembered to do all the big complicated stuff, there was one small thing they’d forgotten. Giuseppe had the simple task of snapping down a clip bolt that locked the dish on the roof of the truck to its satellite tracking base. He simply forgot the simple.
It was a windless, sunny day, so the dish behaved impeccably initially. Our lunch was a distant memory when the helicopter made its first pass over the truck. We were in the last hour of the stage as the loop section of the course was to begin, four times over the finish line
