The lone announcer (Barry Davies) doing the “play-by-play” sounded pretty erudite, and gave a pretty fluid presentation of the “story” told by the show (from the drummers through to the Olive Tree). I looked him up and was surprised to discover that he is a football announcer. He clearly started with the same script that the NBC and CBC folks were given by the Athens committee, but he gave a clean narrative.

NBC’s team of Costas and Couric paired a sports guy and a chatty news person, while the CBC saw Peter Mansbridge (the Corporation’s nightly national news anchor) join Brian Williams (the prime time CBC Olympics anchor, so analogous to Costas). So the CBC put a little more prestige behind its team (perhaps Brokaw didn’t want to it), but still suffered some from extraneous chatter. (I also caught a bit of the Radio-Canada, the French-language CBC, coverage and they were chatting over Bjork’s song!)

I’m not going to theorize on why the BBC Olympics coverage is better than the NBC or CBC one (though I don’t doubt it is), since I haven’t seen any of it. But in this particular case I think a major part of the problem was having two people there. A solo announcer can present a continuous narration, and not talk when the situation warrants. But if you have two people, when one stops talking, the other will probably feel obliged to fill the dead air. After all, if they weren’t going to talk, they wouldn’t have been contracted to be there!