TELEVISION / On the write tracks

'Sport's truth may be simplistic but that doesn't mean it's negligible', said Hugh McIlvanney in 'The Sportswriter' (BBC 2), an Arena film about the craft (some argued art) of writing about games. In common with a number of his other remarks it was both arresting and defensive, a pre- emptive confession designed to parry a more hostile blow. While Arena didn't seem to know quite what it was about (was this a profile, or a literary enquiry or just a hymn to the glamour of physical action?) McIlvanney had a clear purpose in mind - he was trying to pin down the enigma of working at play.

His favoured description of sport - 'a magnificent triviality' - had a similar confessional note to it and when he imagined being asked to choose between a life without King Lear and a life without Pele he reluctantly came down in favour of the bard. This seemed intended as a presentation of credentials but came across again as a mild anxiety, a sense that writing about art was somehow in a different league. He would have less anxieties on this score if he compared his own exemplary prose with much arts coverage but he wasn't alone in his uncertainty about his subject. William Nack, a feature writer, quoted Nabokov quoting Proust to illustrate his own notion of what a good sports journalist did.

More confidence was in order; the truth is, as this programme demonstrated itself, that arty types envy sporty types their direct route to the popular heart (can you imagine an arts strand ever devoting itself to a discussion of business journalism?). The infatuation was betrayed here by the swooning video montages of sporting action, interweaved, overlapped and underscored into grand opera, and in the swell of pathos in which the film luxuriated. Sport offers triumph and despair in forms so concentrated (and ultimately disposable) that they are inaccessible in art to all but the most shamelessly melodramatic soap. And with sport it's all real too.

Appropriately enough, given the series' title, the film found its most powerful expression of sport's enchantment in the shots of vacant arenas which bracketed each section - spaces which seemed tense with the prospect of what was to come or depleted by the sudden discharge of so much emotion. These moments, empty and slightly melancholy, also came to seem the true home of the sportswriter, wedded as they are to anticipation and remembrance, held at a distance from the action itself. They also suggested that the anxiety of the sportswriter isn't entirely a matter of cultural prejudices but also the task of extracting romance from the grubbiest localities, hemmed round by venality and mediocrity.

That may explain why those elements that unequivocally establish the gravity of sports writing are those bemoaned most frequently by its practitioners. Big money in racing and football have made those sports as economically important as most industries while the dangers of the boxing ring mean that the issues are sometimes literally life and death. McIlvanney was at his finest here, exploring the marshy ground where passion meets disgust. Responding to the death of the Welsh boxer Johnny Owen, which he had witnessed, he compressed the opportunity and danger of boxing into an uppercut of a sentence; 'It is his tragedy that he found himself articulate in such a dangerous language.' He could have rested his case there.