No Need For Desperation As Housewives Get Into League
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday November 4, 2006
LAST week Desperate Housewives was the top-rating show on American television with an audience of 21.2 million, well clear of Sunday Night Football, featuring the Dallas Cowboys against the Carolina Panthers, placed sixth, and a World Series baseball game between the St Louis Cardinals and Detroit Tigers, which came a disappointing 12th. In the US, baseball is thought to have done badly if a World Series game doesn't make the top 10.
Still, the NFL match did pull 17.3 million viewers and the World Series game 16.3 million, which, even allowing for the difference in scale to Australia, is pretty impressive. The interesting thing is that both competitions are domestic, showing again that an event doesn't need to be international to attract a big audience.So it has been with rugby league. Ordinarily, tonight's international against Great Britain on Nine wouldn't rate nearly as well as, say, the State of Origin, although Nine's success with the league Test against New Zealand a fortnight ago (with an audience of 1.2 million) suggests that a million or more may tune in to see Australia play the old enemy tonight.The match should attract a sizeable audience in the UK, too. Lately, league has been doing well on TV there. Last year's Super League audience on BSkyB was 25 per cent up on the previous year's, and this year it's up 10 per cent on last year's - notwithstanding the competition from World Cup football.Accordingly, Sky Sports has sent a crew of 14 to provide a live, three-hour broadcast in Britain of tonight's Test, while the BBC has also sent one or two people to supply match highlights. Sky's executive producer of league telecasts is a London-based Australian, Neville Smith, who went to Britain as a cameraman 20 years ago, found his way into league broadcasting, and has been producing the Super League telecasts since the tournament began in 1996. Because of Super League's success, he says, nobody in England is suggesting any longer that league is in danger of being buried by rugby union. "The average Super League crowd this year was over 9000," Smith said. "That may not sound much, but I think the average rugby union crowd was there or thereabouts. There's a perception peddled by the rugby union press every time a player goes across to union that rugby league is on its knees. Well, we've just had 73,000 at the Super League grand final, which was capacity. That's not a game on its knees."The match will be called on Sky by an Australian, too - Mike Stephenson, the Great Britain hooker who moved to Australia in 1973 to play for Penrith and wrote a league column in the old Sydney Sun. Stephenson now spends nine months a year in England, broadcasting league with his on-air partner Eddie Hemmings, but he still calls Australia - specifically, the Bilgola Plateau - home.He thinks international league matches such as tonight's Test are important for the game. "When I was a kid, all you wanted to do was play for your country," he said. "Quite a few people in Australia think, 'Forget about the rest of the world. We're the best - we've got the State of Origin or whatever. Who needs the international game?'"That's burying your head in the sand. What these people forget is that a talented kid in rugby league who wants to tour New Zealand, or France, or Great Britain, but doesn't have the opportunity to do so may well be persuaded to play rugby union, because he'd know that in union he'd be on a high-level tour every single year."A recent survey by Sky Sports turned up the surprising fact that 70 per cent of the people who watch league in Britain live outside the game's heartland - Yorkshire and Lancashire. Twenty per cent live in London, where the game is hardly played. Moreover, a high proportion of viewers were women.Stephenson has noticed the change. "I rent a flat in London. Fifteen years ago people there didn't know me from a bar of soap. Now, people recognise me. It's an absolutely amazing thing. I get inundated from letters from all over the country. Super League has really taken off all over, not just along the M62 corridor."But why so many women viewers? "Because they like the look of the players. It's very rare now that you see cauliflower ears and broken noses. I see the players when they come off the field and I think, 'My God, they're good looking!' Forty years ago, if you were a rugby league player, you'd be guaranteed to wear dentures. Now they wear mouthguards. If you get hit in the mouth now, you don't have to spit out a couple of teeth."
© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald