Transworld Sport loves the snow and winter sports while the MOTD frontman continues to make heavy weather of his appallingly laboured punsWith the London Olympics fewer than 100 days away, some of you will be getting excited, I expect, although probably without reaching the levels of fevered anticipation at Transworld Sport. For TWS, the Olympic games are a kind of fulfilment. All those features where they seek out a promising four-year-old pole-vaulter from a remote village in the Andes, or meet women weightlifters in Iran, are somehow justified if one of the subjects gets to shine on the world stage.The programme is celebrating its 25th anniversary, and whereas some of the Patagonian hockey players and Turkish oil wrestlers they've featured have left our field of vision, it can boast interviews in its early days with a 14-year-old Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters before they were even teenagers.Olympians are what the programme lives for, though. Heck, Transworld Sport even gets excited about the WINTER Olympics. TWS loves people doing stuff in snow. It introduced me to the Iditarod race in Alaska, which I watched from my bed pre-breakfast one Saturday morning when the show used to go out on Channel 4. There is something uniquely comforting about gathering the duvet around you to watch man and dog battling blizzards and sub sub-zero temperatures in Alaska, when your biggest worry is that you think you may have run out of Marmite.A move to Sky has not lessened the winter sport quotient, as illustrated by this week's feature on the most successful ski-jumper of all time, Finland's Matti Nyk�nen, who won three golds at the Calgary games in 1988.Since hanging up his skis ? or whatever you do with redundant skis ? he has had what is popularly referred to these days as a rollercoaster ride, including a spell as a striptease artist, and two prison sentences; one for stabbing a man in a pizza restaurant (there's a lot to be said for those circular pizza cutters), and one for assault on his fourth wife. "Alcohol's not a problem as long as there's plenty of it on the planet, and money's not a problem as long as it's still being printed," he once said, giving fair notice that he and trouble might become bosom buddies.Nyk�nen said it in his own language, too. All the interviewees, even Roger Federer, use their native tongue, which makes TWS stand out from other sports chat shows.Its lack of irony helps, too. Whether covering the Eskimo Olympics, elephant soccer from Thailand, or stilt fighting from Belgium, there's barely a whiff of send-up. When a champion sheep shearer from New Zealand's North Island explained his technique on this week's programme: "You start on the belly, then you go round the crotch, the first hind leg, and then up the tail", there was not a titter. In a broadcasting landscape where sly humour has become the lingua franca, that's quite refreshing.The programme's narrators, Bruce Hammal and Sue Carpenter, you could imagine voicing one of those Look At Life or Path� Pictorial pieces that used to accompany the main feature at cinemas in the 50s and 60s, and TWS's style is not terribly different. Most pieces start with a little travelogue, invariably describing a "city of contrasts" which is vibrant, cosmopolitan, and possibly "boasting a rich cultural heritage".London is now one of those places and this week's show positively glowed about it. It stopped short of mentioning London's many reasonably priced hotels and warm and welcoming taxi drivers, but Jonathan Edwards, of the organising committee, did mention vibrancy, and added that London 2012 would show us "being who we are", which may not be altogether wise.From footage of London at night, with the Eye all lit up, and the lights from the Houses of Parliament reflected picturesquely on the Thames, we switched to the litter-strewn streets of east London, and a down-at-heel looking pie and mash shop. The Olympics are transforming these mean streets, said Edwards, the implication being that in no time at all that grubby food outlet could well be a Nando's. There's legacy for you, right there.Finally, Gary Lineker's jokey sign-offs from Match of the Day are sometimes ? well, always, actually ? on the weak side, but Saturday's is in intensive care awaiting the priest."So Newcastle go marching on," grinned our genial host. "And there was me thinking there was only one Geordie hero who's a cissy." (Newcastle have a striker called Papiss Ciss�, you see, and Alan Shearer is a Geordie too, geddit?) Cue embarrassed laughter.The production people must have known he was going to say it, because they were ready with a cutaway of Shearer. Could nobody stop him? Does anybody say "cissy" any more anyway? That may not only be the worst MOTD joke, but the worst joke ever broadcast on television. I am going through back editions of Little and Large and Russell Howard's Good News to confirm.Olympic Games 2012Winter sportsMartin Kelnerguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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