Campaign for Tasteful On-Screen Graphics
Working in cycling broadcasting meant we watched a lot of cycling. Those guys who sit on Twitter all day banging on about live races? They’re not even 10%. We usually had two races coming in at once, with the satellite receivers programmed hours in advance so we could capture every second from the moment the cameras went live. Which was often long before the live coverage started, and continued several hours after the race had ended.
Then we’d have to watch the five minute and thirty minute highlights to ensure they told the right story and didn’t have any issues once encoded. But we’d never bother rewatching the full broadcast capture, so apologies if you spotted any errors on our part. You didn’t – not because we knew what we were doing, but because nobody was watching the full four hours from stage three of the Tropicale Amissa Bongo. Yeah, we broadcasted everything. In fact, broadcasting literally every bike race in world was so ingrained that we even filmed two now-famous TV presenters fucking about on Bromptons in Shepherd’s Bush, just in case anybody might want to watch the highlights.
It came with benefits. Watching all that cycling made us world experts in the sport. In the formative days of streaming, in which we were inventing internet rights and physically traveling to tiny races and broadcasting them ourselves, there was just nobody else with that level of access to everything on the UCI calendar.
Unfortunately, it also gave us some pretty unique pet peeves that weren’t particularly relatable to your average cycling fan. Those common turns of phrase that commentators use soon get infuriating when you’ve worked 35 days in a row and heard them repeated in 45 different races during that time.
But the worst was the on-screen graphics. We gave a free pass to the smaller races, and honestly most of them kept it simple enough that they did well enough anyway. But Italian races were atrocious. RAI loved filling the screen with low-resolution pink graphics while the race proceeded in a tiny window. It’s like they’d just discovered 1990s editing software and wanted to try it out on some of the sport’s biggest, most prestigious, and most historic races.
These days, the image below would be a meme. It’d get a handful of upvotes on r/pelotonmemes, and then Cycling Pulse would steal it. We’d retire on the clout. But back then, it was just us ranting about stuff nobody cared about. As usual.
Campaign for Tasteful On-Screen Graphics – March 2010
Not a real campaign. Please don’t email us calling us idiots for not enjoying having 2/3rds of our TV screen covered by a giant pink wheel.