The Rise of the Sporting Montage

In the week the Premier League returns, we got actor, die-hard QPR fan and sporting montage obsessive Henry Lloyd Hughes to talk us through the polygamous marriage between sport, music and super-fast editing and their brilliant bastard child - the montage.

When I sleep, I dream in sport. My exploits are rarely uneventful. I’m not the ball boy. Or a left back having a quiet afternoon in League Two before popping home for a Sunday roast. I’m replicating Trevor Sinclair’s overhead kick – AKA The Best Goal Of All Time – or taking a diving catch to win the Ashes, and save England’s pride. But I don’t dream like normal people. I dream in glossy, high-definition, sporting greatness. Tears of ecstasy pour down my face, with all of their Mo captured in Slo. Essentially, I dream in montage. Something that was once confined to filling the 25 seconds between the end of a sporting program, and something else on BBC, but is now a genre in itself.

In days of yore (the 90s), a controversial red card or deflected goal would appear fleetingly on Grandstand, left open to debate in beer gardens across the land. But now, the debate is garnished with vivid, compelling and rewindable footage, all set to the biggest backing track that the programme's budget could afford.

The tipping point for all of this was the Olympics. Each day birthed a new helping of sobbing athletes collapsing in rapture, having exhausted themselves from an event that everyone else had only heard about fifteen minutes prior to broadcast. Then, at the end, a montage would play, reminding everyone how great Great Britain’s athletes were. Now, in the post-Olympics world, many televised sporting events squeeze in mini montages before advert breaks, acting as an appetiser for the main course montage that will come when the final whistle blows. This emerging artform – yes, it is an art – is going from strength to strength, and I’m going to go through some of my personal highlights.

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Song: What If - Alistair Griffin