All things considered, it isn’t a great sign that Alan Titchmarsh’s “Love Your Garden” appears in ITV’s search bar before “Gallagher Premiership Unleashed”.
The headline highlights show for England’s premier rugby competition aired at 7pm on Wednesday, but in true Gen Z fashion, I’m streaming it later to avoid the adverts. The show has been revamped this season and is now presented by 20-something rugby influencers, a brazen but understandable attempt to attract a demographic shunning the sport in droves.
Recent analysis found rugby wasn’t in the 15 most popular sports among British 18 to 27-year-olds for either watching or participation, behind badminton, chess and table tennis. For what it’s worth cricket – a sport I regularly watch for five days straight – also didn’t make that list.
It’s not that I don’t like rugby, although there’s probably some unresolved trauma from schooldays as a maladroit teen avoiding the ball like it was radioactive which restricts my ability to love it. Coupled with the classic concussion concerns and the annual Six Nations infestation of Tim Nice-But-Dims filling up London pubs, I would need convincing to watch regular Premiership games for pleasure.
And so I turned to Gallagher Premiership Unleashed to convince me, but it’s hard to say it did its only job well. If anything, the show’s great failing is its faithfulness to the traditional highlights format and its desire to fill as much of the 45-minute run time as possible with actual rugby.
In fact, the whole production appears confused about what its aims are and who it’s aimed at. If it’s about attracting new fans or invigorating those with a casual interest, it’s not trying very hard.
The pre-match content involved little to no context about how teams were doing or who the players were. In its fourth and most recent episode, there were no line-up graphics and we didn’t see a league table for the first 42 minutes. Post-match analysis of three of the five games only extends to reading out a few relevant tweets.
This week’s show began with a new face, Kai Fagan. A genuine Love Island success story in that he’s engaged to the partner he met en route to winning the competition, he plays club rugby and seemed an engaging if raw presenter.
Perhaps more crucially to the producers, he was enthusiastically promoting the show to his 400,000 Instagram followers. This is supposedly The Point.
In place at Welford Road for Leicester Tigers vs Northampton Saints, Fagan asks a cast of largely interchangeable well-spoken white men either side of 40 what the Midlands derby meant to them. We heard “it’s everything”, “it’s life and death” and “the atmosphere is electric”, but not how the two sides had performed so far or who was playing.
This may sound minor, but without that information the show descended into a host of nicely-packaged but basically meaningless moments, an IPL-esque haze of technicolour shirts and baying crowds which just descends into background noise.
On the flipside, GPU’s greatest success is the thing it was initially most criticised for. Hosted last season by former players David Flatman and Topsy Ojo, the move to rugby YouTubers like Squidge, Ruckstar Lizzie and Rugby Nause works well. There’s just not enough of it.
Squidge is the only one to feature in the last episode, providing analysis from what you can only assume is his bedroom. This is one of a few moments where the budget restriction becomes obvious – this is a show ITV don’t pay for anymore, the Premiership cover costs just to reach a free-to-air audience.
Another is the “Fan in the stands” feature from Exeter vs Bristol, which is very much what it says on the tin – giving a camera and mic to a supporter because they can’t afford to send a presenter.
A Chiefs fan provides cursory, generalised updates pre-match, post-match and at half-time, while there’s a camera on his celebrations when Exeter score. He seems like a lovely man, but it’s hard to call him or his analysis box office.
Squidge – aka Robbie Owen – is concise and interesting, with sharp analysis of the Gloucester vs Bath match which you wish he’d expand to every game.
Trimming down the highlights and giving viewers a lot more of the YouTubers, even from their bedrooms, would be huge progress. If anything, this is a very effective advert for their private channels, which are a far more efficient and enjoyable way of understanding last weekend’s action.
Of course GPU is still finding its feet, but its complete disregard for creating storylines or characters is concerning. A line-up graphic before each match would allow for even 30 seconds of discussion about players to watch or care about, even if it’s just naming the usual England Test suspects. Without stars, a fundamental prism through which Gen Z understands and appreciates sport, rugby’s decline will only steepen.
There may be a way of selling rugby to new generations, but this certainly isn’t it, a half-arsed attempt which ends up appealing to neither potential or current fans. It requires a solid base level of knowledge yet gives little back, with minimal fresh analysis or information that wasn’t previously available.
Craig Doyle, a former presenter of this show and now an owner of the company which produces it, told the Telegraph: “The expectation now from the sports audience is to be drip-fed their sport all throughout the week”.
This may be the case, although it seems oversimplified, and just putting the same rugby on in a less accessible form in midweek is certainly not filling the gap he believes it is.
And the sad thing is that the actual gameplay was clearly great, but rugby doesn’t have football’s simplicity to break into easily consumable highlights in the same way. So when the entire show is just these highlights, there’s nothing to ground your experience or enjoyment of the game in.
As it stands, no one is falling in love with rugby because of GPU. I couldn’t even fall in love with the show enough to convince me to watch the next episode. Alan Titchmarsh it is.
