After enduring the recent "Extreme Fishing" series with Robson Green and sitting through a program on the Spey casting event at the CLS Game Fair this summer I can only conclude that although the station chiefs perhaps see there is an audience for fishing programs, they are not using anyone with experience of the sport to help direct or produce the footage. This is the only explanation I can come up with the explain the dire quality of both the shows mentioned above. They could have been so much more but basically seemed to become schedule fillers rather than taking the chance to be instructional and serve the sport they were covering.
Needless gaff shots, blood dripping from fish being held to the camera, shooting moorhens for sport with scoped rifles, bowhunting for carp and then shooting a native Alligator Gar just because it came along at the wrong time (all of which will get dumped somewhere rather than consumed) just does nothing to help our sport. The channel concerned even wrote back to my letter of concern explaining they wanted to show the reality of "how it is" in the difference countries concerned. In my view championing bad practices rather than seeking to address or better them is just plain sensationalism. They claim they had many letters of support for the show - I guess they have not taken a look at Robson Green's own website then where the majority were complaining about the content. I don't want to knock Robson here, he obviously loves his fishing as do we all, but someone was needed on the team with experience of the localities being used and with a wider experience of game angling around the world to mould this into the show it could have been.
As for the Spey Casting on Horse & Country channel well again it was a nice thought to perhaps try and show an event that rarely if ever gets coverage but it did show you cannot just turn up and film an event like this and hope to really show what goes on. How about a bit of instruction into what a Spey cast is first and how you go about learning this skill. The coverage jumped around between shots trying to cover the complete cast from start to finish but I think only a few casts were actually captured from start to finish in the same shot which was what was needed. Catching casting on film is very hard as you really need the line to stand out preferably against a dark background and the makers obviously struggled with the location and conditions as they were out of their control. Contrast this footage against a professional casting video such as the A-Z of Speycasting and you will see the huge difference in quality.
Please broadcasters, keep making fishing programming but do seek expert advice to make the best of them. There is a huge market out there that cannot be satisfied with constant re-runs of the same half dozen shows. Fishing is constantly moving forward so lets hope we get programming in the future that keeps pace with all the new skills, locations and personalities in our sport.
What do you think?
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