Field in Vision offers the first ever conclusive study of the international phenomenon of television sports coverage. Garry Whannel considers the historical development of sport on television, the growth of sponsorship and the way that television and sponsorship have re-shaped sport in the context of the enterprise culture. Drawing on archival research, Whannel first charts the development of the BBC Outside Broadcast department, and the growing battle for dominance between BBC and ITV, showing how sponsorship and the rising power of sports agents began to transform sport in the 1960s, not only in the UK but across he world. He goes on to examine the implications of this vast and escalating global network during the 1980s by analysing the central role that stars and narratives began to play in television sport, presenting case studies of Major challenges such as Coe versus Ovett, Decker versus Budd and so on. His study also takes into account one of the more indirect, but no less significant results of international televised sport - the rise of popular fitness chic and the American monopoly of the workout boom of the 1980s.
Fields in Vision explains the development of television sport by linking its economic transformation with the cultural forms through which it is represented, offering a study encompassing not simply the sports world, but our relationship with television and the media industries as a whole.