The mirth, the girth and the phoney rebirth

Sport on TV

SOME familiar sporting faces turned up on television last week, albeit in unfamiliar guises. The necessity for sports stars to reinvent themselves is mostly confined to those who have stopped competing, their aims being either to keep earning or, more interestingly, to ensure that their place in posterity is as they would wish it.

In Gower's Cricket Monthly (BBC2, Monday), both ambitions seemed to be in play. David Gower fronts this promising magazine programme with an air of amused bufferdom more suited to a man who retired 20 rather than two years ago. The tweed sports jacket and club tie he sported as he linked the assorted items from Arundel Castle were bizarrely at odds with the "yoof" buzz of the show, which featured retina-detaching graphics and dizzying camera angles.

Instead, the Tiger-Moth-over-Test-ground mischief for which Gower was once famous was left to the Australian soap and breakfast TV star, Mark Little, who scuffed around Derbyshire's ground hoping to get something wacky on camera. This proved mission impossible. When a club official warned Little not to approach an embankment where an "undesirable element" was gathered, he went off excitedly only to find that the lads in question were more Salvation Army than Barmy Army.

The broken format of the programme will always produce a hit-and-miss pattern, but the Allan Donald fast-bowling class, which strangely omitted a lesson on how to apply sun-block cream to your face, and a report on the turmoil in Pakistan's cricket were briskly informative. Indeed, the news that Pakistan may recall that old rascal Javed Miandad to provide some stability was inter-cut with pictures of Javed wind-milling his arms at an umpire.

The fact that the England captain Mike Atherton has ironically interpreted this sort of animation as exactly what Ray Illingworth wants from him, coloured the programme's separate interviews with the two men. Ray, in a night-club swinger's leather blouson, repeated his less-than-guarded warnings to his captain to get some spirit back into the Test side, while Atherton's eyes promised subversive defiance if Ray decided to pick an England team containing Moxon, Byas, Blakey and even Boycott.

There's no doubt that this struggle between the Lancastrian and the Tyke - likely to be framed as modernism versus fartism - will provide a compelling narrative to this summer's Test series. Giving the camcorder to the West Indian batsman Jimmy Adams for a video-diary is all very well, but I know whose back-stage opinions I'd rather see. It will be interesting to discover whose side Gower takes - is the Cavalier now a Roundhead?

There was equal confusion over the new identity of Lennox Lewis in Sportsnight Special on BBC 1. Now dread-locked and up in weight, Lewis tried to convince us that he was still a contender for a heavyweight boxing title. His opponent Lionel Butler, a 27-year-old with a body to reassure watching forty-somethings about their spreading girth, looked dangerous only for those early parts of each round in which his shorts stayed up.

Lewis's strategy was plainly to wait until Butler was immobilised by his wayward trunks and then hit him and run away, rather like the Andrex puppy who knows he can't be chased. It worked, but the grand puppet-master Don King, looking and talking like a man who'd just wet his fingers and then stuck them into an electric socket, seemed unimpressed by Lewis's victory. At least, that's what it sounded like, because King's crazed raps are becoming the defining sound-track to a sport that's losing its coherence.

While Lewis's rebirth was only marginally convincing, there was an attempt in Maradona (Channel 4) to rehabilitate the footballer Diego's reputation, which seemed finally to be trashed after his expulsion from last year's World Cup USA for taking a performance-enhancing drug. An apparently thoughtful, wise but unrepentant Maradona gave his views on world poverty, human rights, the misguided use of militarism and the Mafia-like behaviour of football's authorities. Meanwhile, his pictorial T-shirt extolled the virtues of his "amores", his loved ones, which just happened to include himself in the photograph.

Yet the images away from this calm interview gave another portrait - of a paranoid on the continuing route to self-destruction. His new life, symbolically enclosed by barbed-wire, as the manager of a lowly Argentine club, showed that the internal battle between the sacred and the profane is being lost, now that he can no longer express his frequently beautiful skills on the pitch.

Maradona's "enemies" were everywhere - press, television, football, politics - and he even managed to accuse one of his daughters for beating him in a pat-a-cake game when the cameras were present. By the time the credits rolled on this opera of a career, the film already needed an update. Maradona had resigned from one job, taken another and then left that too. The images of the idealistic barrel-boy had been blurred by those of the barrel-chested thug. It felt less like a rebirth, more like an obituary.