PSST! Want a sure bet? A no-risk, cast-iron certainty you could put your house on? Don't breathe a word about where you heard it from but put all you've got on Royal Athlete in the 1995 English Grand National. What do you mean it was already raced a few weeks ago? It hasn't happened yet according to Prime's promotional ads which were touting the big race 'live' last week. Are Prime in some kind of time warp? If so why can't they get some advance action from some upcoming races? THIS wasn't the only instance of sport crossing with science fiction last week as another programme seemed to fall victim to Einstein's theory of relativity - Friday's live NBA clash on Prime between New York and Charlotte in which the Knicks completed an impressive 20-point turnaround to win.
Actually the stretching of game time into much longer periods of real time is commonplace in the stopwatch-dominated US sports which are fetishistic about accounting for every second of playing time. Taking this game as a random example, the final, exciting four minutes 13 seconds on the game clock took a total of 22 minutes to play.
It means that if you're setting the video timer you should always massively overestimate the stop time.
SCIENCE fiction is the theme also behind one of Prime's snazzier station promos. The montage of numerous exciting sports clips is accompanied by a fanciful voiceover along the lines of: 'In the future you will choose which continent, which event, which player, which camera angle to watch'.
The hypothesis postulates a futuristic home entertainment system in which the viewer has practically become a mixing desk operator in a TV sports addict's utopia, editing his own version of the action. Anyway, Prime's pay-off line is: 'Until that time let us do it for you'. WHARF tinkered with 'truth in advertising' boundaries in their promos for the IBF heavyweight title fight between George Foreman and Axel Schulz which was shown live on pay-per-view on the Wharf Cineplex channel yesterday.
Not that there was anything irregular in them. It's just that they kept making loud and big references to Mike Tyson, the name 'Tyson' flashing on screen numerous times.
The pretext is that the winner of Foreman v Schulz will take on Iron Mike who, of course, is the hottest property in the fight game since his release from prison after serving time for a rape conviction.