Commentators: What are they good for?

 Yesterday I glimpsed Penny Mordaunt carrying a sword. And I thought I'm in love. She looked every inch a woman in her teal-coloured outfit with her Jane Taylor head piece and I was away imagining all sorts of things about ducks, swords, and Penny. Then Hew Evans or one of the myriad commentators barged in with some inane fact that she was the first whatever in seven hundred years doing what she did. 

 Killed my creative imagining stone dead! And when Charlie boy had that fat crown placed on his head, I was imagining it slipping ever so slowly down over hie eyes.  Bloody Hew Evans popped my imaginings with some arcane fact about that headpiece. I couldn't even, on seeing Emma Thompson, recall her many performances or think of her dad and the Magic Roundabout, because some fucking commentator had some puerile fact about her.

Commentators are like the Dementors in Harry Potter, they suck the life out of any live event. They don't need to exist. You can watch a football, tennis, hockey match without someone mumbling on your ear. You don't normally expect a constant commentary as you go out of your house, into the shops and in bed with your mistress (O.K. that's an exception). You don't live thro' someone telling you how to live. So why do you need people to tell you that Joe's kicked the ball, or she's made a great shot - you can see it and experience it without the mediation of a disembodied voice/expert.

The trouble is once you have commentators - they have to say something - anything to fill the void they think is freaking out their audience. Producers and researchers spend days digging up obscure facts with which their commentators can litter the imagined void.

I watched cricket matches and the only sound was leather on willow and the pints being poured. I went to concerts where all I heard was the music - not some superannuated don going on about this and that in the composer's life. I've sat on the lakeside, listened to the silence, and observed. I didn't need Kate Humble to enlighten me on the life cycle of the lesser spotted newt.

There's too much noise, and the most useless is that of commentators who condescendingly interpret life's spectacles for us plebs.