ABSTRACT
To suggest that much contemporary experience of sport is mediated is not new. To claim that music plays an essential role in shaping the meaning of that mediated sport may seem novel. Analyses of broadcast media sport have tended to focus, among other things, on the visual (re)presentation of sports events,2 the commentaries presented as part of those events3 or the supposed negative effects of new technologies, including broadcast media, on sports participation. There is an underlying ahistorical aspect to policy and related debates about mediated sport. It is not as if this sport-media dynamic is all that new: Britain has had a vibrant sporting press since the late eighteenth century and for much of the time it has exhibited national characteristics. A sports press developed later in other countries, but moving pictures of sports events have been publicly shown since the 1890s.4 Technological advances in the twentieth century led to debates about the impact of concurrent broadcast commentaries on attendances at matches: since at least 1926 the Football League (in England and Wales) has been trying to manage its relationship with broadcasting.5 The economic and cultural intertwining of commercial sport and media industries as a sport-media complex has been the subject of extensive analysis by economists (both political and econometric), sociologists, historians, cultural studies based analysts, anthropologists and others. This chapter will not rehearse, rehash or reiterate their analyses: it will explore one way that we might start to think more creatively about this complex of industrial production by exploring the role of a television theme tune in the cultural production of televised sport. The chapter draws on a case study from New Zealand to explore the multiple ways that a theme tune accompanying televised rugby union broadcasts both delineated the show from those around it and embedded the sport in a specific socio-cultural context.
