Presenting The World Of Sports: Sky Sports Presenter - Marcus Buckland
‘The beauty and excitement of doing a live sports event is you never quite know what’s coming next.’
‘It’s preparation for the players but also for us, we’re getting up to speed with all the stats, getting ideas of who the in form players are, who we want to focus on…’
It was with great delight I was invited to Sky Sports’ HQ, the mecca of sports media coverage for the past 20 years, where I got to pose the questions to one of their longest standing sports presenters.
How did you get into sports presenting?
Originally I wanted to be a sportsman, I wanted to be either a footballer or cricketer but I wasn’t going to be good enough to be paid to be either of those. One thing I did naturally from the age of 7 or 8 whenever I was playing football with my friends, I’d find myself commenting and doing fake interviews. So it was a natural progression for me to get into sports broadcasting. I went to university, got involved with the television station there and also set up a newspaper.
Back then the BBC ran various post-graduate sports broadcasting courses, and still does, and I applied to go on one with a friend of mine. It was tough to get on, there were a number of applicants, I forget how many, but luckily I got onto that in 1989, which was brilliant because it was a 3 month training process, during which you were sent to 3 local radio stations. You’d start in London and get 3 weeks of basic training, they teach you a little bit about the law and how to broadcast, then you go off and do a few weeks at a local radio station and come back, get feedback on that, go again, come back, go to a 3rd one, come back and by the end of that if you were half decent you were offered a job, and I was. I got offered a job at radio Gloucestershire as a news reporter.
I always wanted to do sport and a few months later a job came up at radio Merseyside. Liverpool were the biggest team in the country then, I thought this is great, I got a job there and I went to live in Liverpool for 3 years. Getting into the BBC was the most important thing and I spent 3 years in local radio. The BBC also does a course where you come down and work on what they call the local radio desk in their main headquarters and there you get to meet all the people in national radio and have a chance to shine. That coincided with the launch of Radio 5 Live back in 1994 and luckily I got offered a job with the network and was then the very first sports voice on Radio 5 Live when it was launched in ’94.
How did your role at Sky Sports come about?
I had three brilliant years (on BBC radio), went around the world and got involved with football and tennis there, weirdly, these sports seem to follow me around! I went to Melbourne, New York and Paris for all the major tennis events. I wanted to do TV and at the time BBC radio and BBC television were completely separate, now there is much more of an interaction between the two but back in the early to mid 1990s there wasn’t an easy progression from radio to TV. Anyway a producer friend of mine moved to Sky and I remember saying to him, if they’re looking for a new face at Sky don’t forget me. This producer friend of mine did mention my name and I got a phone call a few months later asking if I wanted a screen test. I came for a screen test which was horrendous, I had never done anything like that before, I remember looking at it thinking this is terrible but weirdly about 3 months later they offered me a job and that was in 1997. I came and did the football initially for the Nationwide League and then moved onto Premiere League Football and Prem Plus for 6 years. With sports broadcasting it’s all about contracts and whose got what and in 2007 Sky lost a couple of its packages to Setanta Sports, my contract was coming to an end at the end of that season and so the head of Sky Sports said to me ‘Andy Murray is becoming big news here, can you do the tennis for us?’ So for the last 4 years I’ve been the face for tennis coverage for Sky, which has coincided with the best tennis in terms of the men’s. You’ve got Nadal, you’ve got Federer, you’ve got Djokovic who’s now unbeatable and you’ve got a British guy in Murray who is sill knocking on the door to win a major title. Viewing figures have gone through the roof. It’s got a much, much higher profile than it’s ever had before.
What’s it like covering a big sporting event?
Our biggest fortnight for Sky, the US open starts in August when we will be in New York. We’ve got this fantastic studio just behind the practice courts with the whole of the Flushing Meadows complex behind us. Visually it looks fantastic. For us probably it is 8 hours a day live broadcasting, we’ll start at 11 o’clock in the morning New York time, which is 4 o’clock in the afternoon UK, I will be in the studio with a variety of guests and we’ve got Greg Rusedski, Peter Fleming, Boris Becker, Annabel Croft, Mark Petchey, Barry Cowan, Sam Smith and we’ll get one or two other people who’ll come in as guests as well.
My job will be to link it all together. The beauty and excitement of doing a live sports event is you never quite know what’s coming next. So it might rain all day, in which case the onus is going to be on me in the studio and a conversation led day with lots of bits of tape to go to. That’s when its tough but that’s when you earn you’re money if you’re a good presenter. You’ve got to fill, make it exciting and interesting, and keep people watching. If it’s a normal day we’re going to structure it around the best matches and obviously we’ve got the pick of all the men’s and the women’s because we have the exclusive rights. It’s just fantastic, we’ll go to a Federer match, we’ll then go see Murray play, Serena Williams or who ever it is and react to that, and we’ll get various players up into the studio for an interview.
So it’s fantastic, it’s live television at its best when you don’t know what’s going to happen. If there is a big night match we’ll stay on and do that as well, in which case it becomes a long day. If Murray was to play in a night match it might not finish until midnight, in which case we’re talking 13-14 hours plus the time you’ve got to get out there and prepare. So it can be very long days but it’s exciting, it’s what going into sport broadcasting is all about, you want to be at big sports events, you want to be there reacting and covering it. It’s a dream, the best two weeks of the year.
How do you prepare for major sports events?
There are two big men’s events in the lead up to the US Open in fact women’s events as well but we only have the rights to the men’s for these Master’s series. We do the Canadian Open and the Cincinnati Masters, so obviously we’re following everything. It’s preparation for the players but also for us, we’re getting up to speed with all the stats, getting ideas of who the in form players are, who we want to focus on and trying to arrange interviews with such and such because they’ve just had a good run. We’ve got a great production team, there’s a huge group from the directors to the producers, assistant producers, the sound people, the lighting and the make-up guys or girls. The technical side of things I don’t begin to understand but there’s a team of about 70 of us and all you can see when you arrive are cables and wires. I struggle to change a plug at home so I’m glad I’m not involved in that.
Because we’ve done it for a few years you have a rough idea of what is going to go into each show, but really you’ve got to react when you are out there, you don’t know what the stories are going to be, you’ve got an hour’s preview show on the Sunday but once it gets going it’s partly what the story is and secondly, in any sport, it’s the access to the players because the world’s media is there and you’ve just got to push to make sure you get the interview. If Federer has done something good then you’re kind of in the hands of the media liaison people as well.
What’s it like presenting a live sports programme with an audience of millions?
It’s fun, it’s exciting. Live TV is obviously edge of the seat stuff but one thing I always remember is that no one is going to die, it’s not a matter of life and death. Put it into that perspective to begin with and you do get that buzz. Live TV is actually in some ways easier, when we do a recorded programme now they can be a nightmare because you don’t get quite the same adrenalin that comes with when you’ve got to get it right first time. I can always remember years ago doing the football and we did a 2 hour recorded show because they thought it would be easier to record it than to do it live. It was recorded about 4 hours before it was actually going to go out on transmission. Anyway none of us could keep a straight face, everything went wrong, it took about 3 and a half hours to record and it just struck me then its much better to try and do it live if you can. Ok, sometimes it’s a risk if you get a guest in who’s never done TV before, you’re dicing a little bit because they might clam up and the interview might not be great but another quote that was said to me was that there is no such thing as a bad interviewee, only a bad interviewer. If you can relax somebody, even the most nervous, first time guest, it should be ok and ask the right questions. It’s all part of the challenge so it’s just exciting, it’s what you want to do, and it’s definitely the peak of the business.
What are some of the challenges you face as a presenter?
Funnily enough, one of the exciting things about this year is the new technology. Technology is the be all and end all and over the past few years new technology has transformed the way we do things. You’ve got so much interaction between players, the public and ourselves with the likes of twitter and this year we’re using a Sky Pad for the first time, which is this fantastic new facility that will transform the way we can portray what we’re doing. It’s a bit like an iphone, you just touch the screen and whatever you want comes up. You can show statistics, order of play and past winners. There’s a big map of the whole arena at Flushing Meadows and with a press of a button you can show the main court and what matches are on or court no.2 and so on. It’s going to revolutionise our coverage. Of course it can go wrong, if you press the wrong button but you’ve got to treat it as a bit of a joke, and relax. It’s the same as anything, if you say something wrong or somebody clams up, it’s how you react to it and people actually like it if things go a little bit wrong. You’ve just got to treat it as a bit of fun and move on.
What’s it like to have someone talking in your ear the whole time?
That’s the hardest part to get used to. After a while you just learn to edit out what you need to hear and what you don’t need to hear. You’ve got your producer talking in your ear and the PA who’s job it is to get the timings right. So if you’re running a tape, you’ll hear ‘another 30 secs on this tape’ or if you’re doing an interview she might be saying ‘you’re going to have to wrap this up in 45 seconds’ and you can hear the director saying ‘cut to this picture’, so there’s a lot going on and a really good producer will just keep saying to you the key thing, which in a live show is what’s coming next. As a presenter all you really want to know is what am I going to do at the end of this interview or at the end of this conversation. As long as you know you’re now going to throw down to Annabel Croft who’s waiting to interview Roger Federer or you’re now going to show highlights of the match last night between Murray and Nadal, that’s all the confidence you need and so it’s not as difficult as it may seem. Initially you may think all these voices but then you realise the most important thing, what I’m doing now and what I’m going to do next. So it’s a skill but most people pick it up after a while.
What do you enjoy about being a sports presenter?
Being involved in live sport first of all, having the chance to meet superstars of the game I’ve always admired. I love the camaraderie particularly with the tennis team at Sky, everyone gets on really well, it’s a good bunch of people and you feel part of a team, which is great. The variety too, I’m lucky I do the tennis on Sky, I also do Premiere League Football for IMG and voice over a couple of football shows a week for them. Over the years I’ve also covered golf, boxing, rugby and a couple of other sports as well. But, as I said before, I wanted to be a professional sportsman and so the next best thing for me was to get paid to talk about them.
What advise would you give to any presenters wanting to get into the industry?
The sort of things I did which aren’t rocket science are for example do some hospital radio and get in touch with your local BBC or independent radio station. Just get involved there because they love having volunteers and once you get in it’s amazing how quickly you can get an opportunity to do things. Watch people who you admire and try and work out why you admire them as well. On the sports side of things one thing that is going to be harder for broadcasters is increasingly ex-sportsmen are becoming broadcasters. In one way there’s more opportunity because of the mass expansion of satellite channels etc. and there’s a lot more opportunity but at the top end scale there’s fewer chances because you’ve got your Gary Lineker’s, your Sue Barker’s and in the cricket they’re all ex-England captains now. So it’s very, very competitive but if you’ve got a genuine love for it, then go for it. It’s hard work and it’ll eat into your weekends, so you’ve got to really want to do it, take any opportunity to just get with broadcasters and do whatever you can and your break will come.
Julian Gaskell