Ms. Eclectic absolutely loves to watch figure skating on television. I watch it with her sometimes.
This year the World Figure Skating Championships are being held here in London, Ontario. Rather than pay $1300 each for a full pass (let's face it: I wouldn't have), we opted to watch the competitions live on television.
Interestingly, CBC decided NOT to telecast the entire event on their regular channels. Instead they are showing the competitions: all, everything, on their bizarre alternative channel, CBC-Bold, a channel which is not in most basic cable packages.
Ordinarily such a decision would irritate me. But I love this one --- not so much because the telecasts are on Bold, but because instead of all the horrid interviews and horrid chit-chat that we see on the regular CBC channel (when it does cover the event), we get very straight-forward commentary by PJ Kwong. She is superb in this role.
She is a former skater and former skating coach. She does the commentary alone, and is very informative with no nonsense. She doesn't whine, she doesn't moralize; she just describes what has happened and what is happening. She pulls no punches, and yet she is very supportive and very positive.
In many ways, PJ Kwong is the Vin Scully of figure skating.
Wouldn't it be absolutely wonderful if more telecasters would do something like this for more sports!
And CBC take note: you can dramatically reduce the size of your budget by covering more sports this way in the future.