Nothing in recent years has changed top-level sport as much as television.

Take the Olympics.

The sale of broadcasting rights for the Games has channelled huge quantities of cash unimaginable a generation ago to the International Olympic Committee (IOC)'s Lausanne headquarters and onwards to participating sports bodies around the world.

At the same time, the enormous global audiences that technological advances have made possible have transformed the world's premier multi-sports event into a gigantic marketing opportunity for the cities bold and sophisticated enough to host it.

The Beijing 2008 Olympic Opening Ceremony was the first television programme in history to attract a billion live viewers.


So it was high time someone produced an insightful, accessible history of sport on television.

British journalist Martin Kelner has now done just that.

Sit Down And Cheer is very much UK-focused; it devotes much attention to figures such as Peter Dimmock and David Coleman, who, while familiar to, and revered by, British sports fans such as myself, mean less, clearly, to the average French or American reader.

But the time span Kelner needs to negotiate begins and ends, more or less, with an Olympic Games staged in London.

And there can be few better ways of encapsulating how completely and utterly the worlds of sport and television changed in the intervening 64 years than Dimmock's succinct description of the London 1948 Opening Ceremony.

"The teams all came into Wembley, lined up, then we had all the speeches, then they all marched out."

What, no industrial-scale chimneys? No skydiving monarch?

What is more, according to Kelner - who writes with the panache that will be familiar to connoisseurs of his newspaper columns - Prime Minister Clement Attlee's welcome message was "delivered as if it were a warning to be wary of chip pan fires".


Even the genius of Danny Boyle would have been hard-pressed to do much with that.

Then again, the number of viewers was probably limited to the low hundreds of thousands, as opposed to high hundreds of millions.

Nevertheless, the 1948 Games came at the right time and, as Kelner says, were "crucial to the development of TV in Britain" since they provided a vehicle to stand out from the then still dominant medium of radio.

Despite post-war austerity, the number of TV licences jumped from 15,000 to 90,000; the Daily Express suggested that the corner may have been turned.

Though Kelner deals perceptively and entertainingly with the great television moments of the past, however, it is his vision of the future, tentatively offered, that gave me most food for thought.

He first observes that gambling companies have taken over from the booze and cigarettes of yore, and the financial services businesses of more recent vintage as televised sport's main sponsors and advertisers.

He then highlights his own experiences of watching TV in conjunction with social media and interactive technology enabling viewers to bet on an event that might be happening thousands of miles away (in his case it was the 2012 Australian Open tennis final) while watching.

His conclusion? "Is there not a chance that the future of sport on television is that events will be created by or bought up by bookmakers?"


He goes on: "As far as the home market goes, the only thing we can say for certain is that betting opportunities on sport – and beyond – will proliferate, and it will become easier than ever to lose while you view.

"If even someone like me old enough to have stuck his head out the train window and get a piece of coal in the eye can manage effortlessly to lose a tenner on the Aussie Open without missing a point, the die is definitely cast."

It seems to me that the timing of Kelner's musings, as sports bodies and others are highlighting illicit gambling as a significant potential threat to the integrity of sport, is interesting to say the least.

Not that I would suggest for a moment that the entities actually sponsoring TV sport run anything other than wholly legitimate operations that can add greatly to the appeal of an event for a large number of people.

But the more the market grows, fuelled by the omnipresence of live sports coverage and the sheer ease of betting afforded by today's technology, the bigger the temptation for the unscrupulous to try to corrupt athletes and officials.

Sit Down And Cheer – a history of sport on TV by Martin Kelner is published by Bloomsbury.

David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen's Twitter feed can be accessed here.