I’m not defending TCS as The Greatest Show On Earth, but in its defence…
‘Too many ad breaks’ – how do you think programming gets made? Or magazines get written, designed, photographed? We want to watch commercial TV ‘for free’ and enjoy mags at a reasonable cover price – so putting up with advertising’s the price we pay.
‘Too London-centric’- understandable for the first few shows. It’s made in London, it’ll be more affordable to shoot stuff in London, London has a higher concentration of bike commuters/casually keen cyclists than anywhere else – and that will be the target market for a show like this. I don’t live in London. It would be disappointing if future shows didn’t venture out of the capital, obviously.
‘We like our tech and innovations’ – WE’RE not really the target market for this show though, so it’s no surprise it hasn’t featured discussions on 650b wheels or titanium bottle cage bolts. As important to the bike industry as we might think we are, die-hard MTB-ers won’t figure too high in the broadcasters/advertisers considerations for delivering decent audience figures and thus viable ad revenues. Hardcore roadies won’t have had their fancies tickled either – in the grand scheme of mainstream-ish broadcasting we’re far too niche a group to worry about over-much.
Was the cycle show produced by enthusiasts or liberal democrat voters?
You MUST be joking. A show like this produced by enthusiasts? What enthusiasts? Cycling enthusiasts? What flavour? MTB-ers? XC-ers? Or DH guys? Maybe roadies? Racers, or sportivers? Or commuters? Time-triallists?
They’d all spend so long arguing about the minutiae of what from their particular discipline should go in that the show would never get made. And if it did, only 14 people would watch. And it would cost 3million quid per show, what with the features from the Etape Du Tour, Utah, Cass Gilbert’s touring round Chile etc etc.
TCS is a massive, frothy compromise as far as dyed-in-the-wool bikers are concerned. That’s just the way of a show like this.
I think the producers are making a pretty decent fist of getting it off the ground and I hope it sticks around long enough to improve and include some decent content from ‘our’ side of the sport/activity. It’s about as much as we can realistically hope for I think…