I'm a David Duffield fan ..........but I thought Kelners article in todays Guardian is excellent.
One does not wish to be unkind but the thought that crops up when watching cycling on Eurosport - not, I have to admit, a daily occurrence in my case - is forget the riders, what on earth is David Duffield on?
Duffield, well into his 70s now, is Eurosport's venerable cycling commentator, a former competitor who has been covering bike racing since the birth of the channel, and he expects any day now to complete his first sentence.
His problem, apparent during last week's Dauphiné Libéré, the 219km stage from Grenoble to Roanne, is that in his mind he is addressing several different audiences: Brits, foreigners, people watching live, those watching recorded highlights, cycling enthusiasts, casual viewers who like looking at pretty pictures of rural France and, I suppose, the odd passing pharmacist interested in the latest developments.
Duffield will begin by addressing one of these groups, then interrupt himself with an apology to all the others for whom the information is not strictly relevant, and finally lose the thread of what he was trying to say in the first place. It would not be strictly accurate to describe Duffield as the king of the dangling participles but there is definitely something dangling there.
On the afternoon I was watching he started praising Bradley Wiggins, the British rider wearing the yellow jersey, before remembering the overseas viewers: "Do bear with me if I do get carried away, because I know Eurosport coverage goes to 90 million, er, 99 million . . ." - at this point I am sure he said 99 million countries which, even with the break-up of the old Soviet Union and Eurosport's huge penetration seemed to be overstating the case a little - "and of course we're interested in what Biggins will do. You can understand the bias and what a weekend with the result in formula one." Whether this Biggins he speaks of is Christopher, whom I do not like to think of in Lycra, or some other Biggins, he did not specify.
"Do bear with me" is one of Duffield's catchphrases, and you know that when he craves forbearance in this way he is about to come out with an absolute pip and it is time to reach for the notepad and pen. Obviously this applies particularly if you are charged with producing a semi-humorous column about sport on TV but is also worth noting if you are one of those people collecting Duffieldisms for one of the various websites dedicated to them.
"Rough end of a ragman's trumpet" and "blast on the old banjo" are Duffield favourites apparently but I never heard them on that afternoon. Maybe he is saving it all for the Tour de France. "Ooh, steady the bus," as the riders rounded a bend, is the best I can contribute to this valuable internet resource.
Duffield also has a rather quaint idea of the daytime audience. "Many people watch us in the afternoon," he said. "Women, the kids haven't come home from school yet, and they switch on. Obviously there are cycling specialists wanting to know about the gears and what they had for breakfast . . ."
And so another thought was left just dangling but I assume what the Duffster was beginning to articulate was that he felt obliged to go through some of the tedious basics of the sport for the benefit of full-time mothers who, briefly and temporarily liberated from maternal duties, would eschew such competing attractions as quiz shows, programmes about people doing up property in Spain, repeats of that ancient detective series with [censored] van Dyke in it, re-reading the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, sitting in an easy chair listening to a favourite album, extra-marital affairs, marital affairs and Steve Wright in the Afternoon, in order to whack on the old Eurosport for stage two of the Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré.
Yes, they are probably all at it in the suburbs, David. Maybe they combine it with Tupperware parties. Duffield, as ever, was having a party on his own. When he was not going into raptures about the riders - "Look at the faces, guys at work, puffing and panting" - he was marvelling at the pictures these modern cameras were bringing us.
"Great photography, isn't it?" he enthused. "There are cameras in the helicopters sending the pictures back, and those chaps on the motorcycles, and there's a van just by the finish, and the director has one, two, three, four, five pictures to choose from. This costs a lot of money. It is not like covering football or tennis with static cameras, and I know we do tennis wall-to-wall . . ." where the thought again sort of tailed off, just as the director chose a close-up of a rider's buttocks in full hill-climbing mode - from the arsecam, I expect.
You can sympathise with Duffield. For the general audience there is not a lot going on in the middle period of a race and the Dufferino comes from a generation that believes in value for money, so he just keeps on commentating.
And, you pick up some stuff. The riders have radios in their crash helmets, you know, so team managers can convey tactics. Get on your bike and pedal like hell, I should have thought would cover it, but apparently not. It is a highly tactical business. The Tour de France is next, and Duffers is the man to interpret it for us - if, like Paris Hilton, he ever manages to complete a sentence.