The commentary that was invented from a telegraph wire

Early radio stations recreated matches they were not attending, and the fakery taught broadcasting how to tell a story.

A station receives a telegraph message that reads, in effect, strike one. In the studio, a man with a microphone describes the pitcher adjusting his cap, shaking off a sign, the crowd noise rising, the delivery, the swing. Somebody knocks a pencil against a wooden block for the sound of contact. The listener at home hears a live ball game from a thousand miles away.

This was normal practice for years, and the era produced at least one future head of state who did it for a living.

It was not quite a fraud, because most listeners knew, or half knew. Stations announced recreations. Rights holders charged for the wire feed. The convention was understood in the way that a play is understood: everyone agrees to the pretence in order to get the thing they want, which was a game they could not otherwise hear.

What interests me is what the format taught. A telegraph line gives you the outcome of each ball or pitch and nothing else. No pace, no atmosphere, no drama, no reason to keep listening. So the recreator had to invent all of it, and the inventions that worked became the grammar of sports broadcasting: setting a scene before the action, describing a player's habits, holding tension across a pause, treating a delay as a story rather than dead air. The men doing it were not covering the game. They were writing it live, and they discovered that the writing was most of what the audience came for.

Anyone who has heard great cricket commentary on the radio knows the descendant. Long stretches of a Test match contain no events at all, and the broadcast survives on digression, memory and the occasional description of a bird on the outfield.

The recreations died when wire services got faster and networks bought proper rights, and the practice is remembered now as a curiosity or a hoax.

I would put it the other way round. Live commentary had to be invented by people who had nothing to look at, and the trade has been living off their solutions ever since. The camera made description optional. It did not make it better.