Time to Reflect on Blah-Blah-Blah

By Frank Trippett

Late in his career, Announcer Bill Stern made an endearing confession about his vocal ways as the Christopher Columbus of television sportscasting. Said he: "I had no idea when to keep my big, fat, flapping mouth shut." The insight dawned too late to be of much use to Stern, but it might have been of value as a guide for his heirs. Unfortunately, nobody in the broadcast booth was listening. The result is the TV sports event as it is today: an entertainment genre in which an athletic game must compete for attention with the convulsive concatenations of blah-blah-blah that passes for commentary.

Television sportscasters, in short, are still a long way from mastering the art of the zipped lip. It is this familiar fact that has legions of sports fans eagerly looking forward to a special telecast of a football game that NBC has promised for Saturday, Dec. 20. The teams and site (Jets vs. Dolphins at Miami) are of little importance compared with the radical innovation that will be the main attraction: the absence of the usual game commentary. Thus the telecast will offer--and here Sports Columnist Red Smith leads the cheers--"no banalities, no pseudo-expert profundities phrased in coachly patois, no giggles, no inside jokes, no second-guessing, no numbing prattle." Just one announcer will be on hand, says NBC, to offer only the sort of essential information (injuries, rulings) that a stadium announcer traditionally provides. The prospect is engaging, even if it may be shocking to see a game presented merely for the sake of the drama on the field.

This blabber-proof telecast looms as far too rare an occasion to waste only in joy over a trial separation from the stream of half-consciousness that usually accompanies athletic endeavors on the tube. While sports fans will surely relish the moment, it should also be seized for grander purposes, for awareness may just be dawning in the Age of Communication that silence is indeed often golden. President-elect Ronald Reagan has so far, often to the chagrin of the press, shown an admirable reluctance to grab all of the many chances he gets to sound off on just about anything. Given the possible alternatives, Yoko Ono's fiat that John Lennon's passing be marked with ten minutes of silence around the world was inspired. In truth, the day of the telecast experiment would be a perfect time for the nation to reflect generally--and silently--on the whole disgruntling phenomenon of superfluous talk.

The American tendency to unchecked garrulity is most conspicuous in the realm of TV sports, but it does not begin or end there by a long shout. The late-evening TV news, for example, is aclutter with immaterial chatter. "Happy talk, keep talkin' happy talk . . ." Rodgers and Hammerstein offered that lyrical advice to young lovers, but a great many TV news staffers have adopted it as an inviolable rule of tongue. Happy talk is not reprehensible, but should it be force-fed to an audience looking for the news? Surely not, no more than a sports fancier tuning in football should be obliged to endure Tom Brookshier and Pat Summerall happily going over their personal travel schedules.

Admittedly, there is not likely to be universal agreement on precisely what talk is superfluous when. The judgment is aesthetic, and tastes vary. Some Americans might regard all sermons, lectures and political speeches as superfluous. Such testiness, however, can be shrugged off as a symptom of hyperactive intelligence. The criteria for talk should be appropriateness and pertinency. The essential question is: Does it subtract from or enhance the moment into which it falls? The deeper reason that sports commentary is annoying is that it so often ruptures the flow of the main event. The effect is easier to see when one imagines it occurring in the middle of a true drama, Othello, say:

"Now here's the video tape again with still another angle on lago as he evilly fingers Desdemona's hanky. And look! lago is curling the old lip just a trifle. Nice curl too, eh, Chuck? This chap was learning lip curling when the rest of that cast couldn't find the proscenium arch with both hands. Incidentally, about that hanky --you know, the star himself bought that hanky for 79-c- at Lamston 's just before opening when it turned out the prop man used the real thing as a dustcloth. Now back to the action onstage. . ."

Existence today often means escaping from the latest Oscar award acceptance speech only to be trapped within earshot of a disc jockey who considers it a felony to fall silent for a second. Some 5,000 radio and TV talk shows fill the air with an oceanic surf of gabble, a big fraction of it as disposable as a weather-caster's strained charm. It is easy to snap off and tune out, but it is not so simple to elude real-life blather. Try to get away from it all, and soon a stage-struck airline captain will be monologuing about terrain miles below and half-obscured by the cloud cover. Go to the dentist, and the procedure is all but ordained: thumbs fill the mouth, the drill starts to whine, and a voice begins to express all those unpalatable political opinions.

At the movies, it is usually the couple two rows back who turn out to be practitioners of voice-over chic, tenderly broadcasting all the half-baked thoughts they ever half-understood about Fellini. Dial a phone number and the absent owner's talking machine coughs a set piece of cuteness before granting a moment for you to interject a brief message. As for bridge players, the typical foursome hardly finishes the play of a hand before the air burbles with a redundant rehashing of it all.

Personality, roles and situations all work in the chemistry that induces excessive chatter. And certain subjects pull the stopper on even temperate people. Food, for example, instigates a preposterous quantity of repetitious chat. Sex? It has already provoked such an excess of discussion--functional and gynecological--that it is fair to rule all future comment on the subject may be surplus.

Cabbies and barbers have long been assailed for marathon talking, but it is unjust that they so often wind up at the top of the list of nuisances. Indeed, cabbies are often mute and sullen, and ever since barbers became stylists they have felt sufficiently superior to clients that their urge to talk has diminished.

To be nettled by untimely yakking does not imply the advocacy of universal silence. A rigorous discipline, silence is practiced by certain monks and others who believe that it heightens the soul's capacity to approach God. For ordinary people, a bit of silence may occasionally seem golden, but what they mostly need is the conversation that keeps them close to others. Those who do not get enough talk tend to wither in spirit.

Says Linguistics Scholar Peter Farb in Word Play: "Something happened in evolution to create Man the Talker." And a talker man remains, with speech his most exalting faculty. Talk is the tool, the toy, the comfort and joy of the human species. The pity is that talkers so often blurt so far beyond the line of what is needed and desired that they have to be listened to with a stiff upper lip.

--By Frank Trippett

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