I know the way in which angling is represented on television often makes anglers despair but - given how other sports talk about 'the lifeblood of TV' - do you think fishing needs TV exposure if it is to survive?

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Jeffrey Prest
Features Editor
Trout Fisherman

Fishing is a participant sport - not a spectator sport.

I dread the day when you arrive at the river to find - terracing, floodlights, police on horseback, a squad of photographers and a couple of iffy kebab/burger vans or god help us, lager in plastic glasses.

On the other hand, I caught an "Accidental Angler" last night on Dave - the one where he chases brown trout in London - and that was good telly.

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Plusnet/Madasafish > Liars to the internet community

In a nutshell.... no. Fishing has "survived" quite well for many years without coverage. Having said that any good fishing programmes on occasion do the sport no harm,so are to be applauded.
It is the poor programmes that should be avoided. Trout & About & Robson Greene come to mind recently. Like Down Stream said a participator sport so for that reason does not always lend itself to TV coverage. Getting the right message out there is also important as there are a vocal minority that would see all fishing ceased if they got their way, so programmes must reflect that in order not to give any ammunition to the antis. I also took in the repeated Accidental Angler & I agree it was good TV
Tight Lines

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"The Future's Bright The Future's Wet Fly"

Not the way they make them NO, they are either for millionairs or doley carp men with there tackle pinched out of some ones shed!! And answer me this why do fishing videos use the same music as porno films??

I think fish need TV exposure to survive. In so far as until humans understand what the results of their actions are on all the things fish need to survive then the fish will remain in danger. TV is the great educator for those who are not involved enough to know already.

richard

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Who resides on the right bank of the Derbyshire Wye and is lulled to sleep each night by the mutterings of a weir, dreaming that "When the rivers and their inhabitants come first, we ALL win..."

Richard, I totally disagree, it would/will just encourage more people to trample down to rivers on Sunday afternoons, with their dogs, kids and picnic baskets, to have a look.

I don't think the majority of the general public can ever be educated enough by television programs or otherwise to understand the things necessary to ensure the continued survival of fish in general and Trout/Grayling in particular, when most of those things require that public to leave the wild places alone and let them be wild.

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Vulgata (formerly fishgb - AKA Gary Bell) Dorchester, Dorset.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

Yes, unless you want the tv to be over taken by all the soppy "save a bear that has been gangbanged in Turkey so we can put him together with the donkeys to make our own fubar production" type animal rights appeals.

Instead of one of those it would be much better to have a 5 minute clip by James Prosek called "The compleat Angler.

People need some reality and the general populace are idiots (gullable) with not alot of knowledge on countryside issues.

"Need" is a very loaded word, to me it implies that something is a necessity. Does angling need TV in order to survive? I'd agree with the others, no it doesn't.

Can angling benefit from the right kind of television program? Absolutely.

First of all--and this one is especially relevant in the UK--it further solidifies our moral right to fish. This puts the animal rights whack-jobs on the defensive by forcing them to make absurd arguments when the public can see they aren't true. By putting it on TV, it shows that anglers aren't hiding anything.

Secondly, it exposes people, and especially kids, to the sport and encourages involvement. Many, especially the kids, would never otherwise have even seen the sport. I feel really bad for the kids these days, over here the term being applied by the fieldsport groups is that kids suffer from Nature Deficit Disorder.

So many kids are raised by either single parents that don't have the time, knowledge, or funds or couch-potato parents that don't do anything in the outdoors beyond the occasional check to make sure their Sky dish is still on the roof. How would these kids have any chance at all to see the sport and to want to get started? It isn't going to come from their parents.

I think there's the temptation to think that less anglers on the water would equal less competition for the fishing and that would be a good thing. The problem with that thinking is that over here at least anglers are one of the few conservation groups that put their money where their mouth is as far as improving water quality, fighting pollution, and restoring bodies of water that have been damaged or degraded. These projects rely on anglers and less anglers equals less money and motivation for these improvements.

Grouse

On this side of the pond we have an entire fishing channel (World Fishing Network, WFN), 24 hours of TV fishing shows (YAWNNNNNN). There are some very bad shows here as I'm sure there are in UK. One of the shows on WFN is "Fish-O-Mania", a UK fishing competition show -- love seeing the crowd in the grandstand as they're going after carp -- most interesting especially if you compare to pro bass tournaments in North America. But there are some very fine fishing shows too; some are on fly fishing such as The New Fly Fisher, Sportfishing On The Fly, or What A Catch which just happen to be Canadian produced. So some shows I can definitely do without but there are some good ones too (especially the ones mentioned above).

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"Fly fishing is solitary, contemplative, misanthropic, scientific in some hands, poetic in others, and laced with aesthetic considerations. It's not even clear if catching fish is actually the point." -John Gierach

http://tippetsandleaders.wordpress.com/

Hi', I think what Richard is saying is that we need to educate the general public in regard to conservation of rivers. The average non-angling person, apart from those whose job it is to look after our water courses, or those who have an interest in nature in general, has little knowledge of the ecology of a stream and its surrounds, plus the overall effects of acts or developments which change the environment of the watershed which gives birth to a stream.
For example, the average person may see upland drainage only as a necessary improvement to grazing by sheep. The conservationist sees it as a threat to the environment from fell to coast, down the length of a valley.
One of the greatest threats to the denizens of our rivers is over-enthusiastic drainage, followed by over-enthusiastic abstraction, along with heavy-handed fertilisation and abuse of the waterway by pollution in so many forms.
Who is the person most affected by the above --- the angler. He is, if his heart is in the right place, because the health of the river should be his prime concern, it is certainly mine.
No other sector of the public has the opportunity to monitor rivers as closely as the anglers whose sport depends upon their health. The sooner the public is made to realise the importance of the conscientious angler's role, the more
likely he is to be accepted for what he is -- a guardian of the river, not its plunderer.
No sector of the public cares as much about the maintainance of the quality of a stream. or the maintenance of the water course that ensures it. People need to be told that when we improve the quality of the river and its surrounds for fishing, we improve it for the flora of the river and its banks; we improve it for the invertebrates in the water and the margins; we improve it for all the higher order of animal life, fish, birds and mammals that are dependent upon it. We may even improve it for those who suffer the effects of flooding. I write from experience, having seen the South Tyne valley turned from an area that produced floods which I term 'six-day wonders' into a water course that can produce brown spates twice in twenty-four hours.
The bird-watcher and the otter-watcher, for example, benefit from the efforts of those who strive to improve rivers, as do the farmers whose stock are watered in them, if they are clean.
If we can make the TV viewing public understand the importance of what conservation minded anglers achieve, at times, we can only improve our image. One of the snags with making angling films is the fact that as soon as
all the necessary paraphernalia is in place, the angling scene may no longer be the natural area that it was when the angler fished it unaccompanied. Dr
Malcolm Greenhalgh could tell you all about that -- 'railway lines' bearing cameras along the bank of a river etc.
Perhaps, when producers discuss the needs of the angling public, they will be able to put across to non-anglers the right 'pitch' on behalf of us, and more importantly, the river. Terry C