Written by TTT Subscriber Bob Pearce.

What do TV football pundits actually do?

Their main skill seems to be to have a selection of set phrases available for a range of events that happen, and to be able to combine them in relatively random ways to avoid them sounding monotonous.

A shot is saved:

“He made himself big.”

“He stayed on his feet.”

“Strong hand.”

“He watched it all the way.”

What other job’s main skill is to have a selection of set sounds available for a range of events, and to be able to combine them in relatively random ways to avoid them sounding monotonous?

A wind chime.

You could describe a wind chime as a decorative arrangement of small pieces of glass, metal, and shell, with a ‘clapper’, suspended from a frame, typically hung near a door or window so as to make a tinkling sound in the draught.

The wind blows. ‘Cling’. ‘Ding’. ‘Clang’. ‘Dong’.

As Steven Wright once said: “My daddy told me wind chimes were for stupid people so they’d know when there’s a breeze”.

The sounds produced by a wind chime gets filed under a genre called ‘Generative Music’. All the work goes into designing the selection and assembly and placement. The system is set up and you wait and see what combinations it produces when a trigger event occurs. Thereafter it requires no skill or intelligence.

As Eric Morecambe might have put it, “I’m playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.”

The wind blows. ‘Ding’. ‘Cling’. ‘Dong’. ‘Clang’.

You could describe a football pundit as a decorative arrangement of small pieces of cliché, platitude and banality, with a ‘yapper’, spoken from a microphone, typically hanging out near a football pitch so as to make a jingling sound in the match.

Football pundits can be understood as being like a collection of wind chimes, each triggered to jingle by different events on the football pitch.

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