Darts, mate...

NO MAS TV REVIEW

Mayweather-Hatton 24/7
HBO, 30 minutes
Sunday nights, 10 p.m.




I admit that I was looking forward to the debut of Mayweather/Hattton 24-7 last night. I'm a sucker for big-time fight hype when it's done right, and the De La Hoya/Mayweather series, to my mind, was right as rain. It accomplished everything hype should and at the same time was compelling just as pure documentary. Not to mention that it was a straight-up knockout for the sport of boxing, always welcome in the land of Large.

Based on what I saw last night, Mayweather/Hatton is going to fall quite a bit short of that mark, which is perhaps not so much the fault of the show as the fault of the principals. Floyd is great television, but in small doses. In the De La Hoya series, he was electrifying, and yet it was for most of us a first journey into his strange universe of sociopathic would-be father figures and second childhood fueled by attention deficit disorder and conspicuous bricks of cheddar in every outstretched hand. Revisiting his tiny monarchy of mo' money, even sitting one on one with the King himself in an intimate fireside chat, one can't help but divine the bleeding obvious of Pretty Boy Floyd Mayweather - there's no there there.

Meanwhile, over in Manchester (to borrow the show's default transition), there turns out to be surprisingly less to Ricky Hatton than meets the eye. Watching his performance last night, I was reminded of Martin Amis's Keith Talent from the novel London Fields, an East End swindler of note much enamored of petty larceny, lager and the vicissitudes of the dart-board. The narrator in London Fields ends up taking darts lessons from Keith, and at one point throws the darts to the ground in disgust with his own ineptitude. Instantly, Keith leaps on him and pins him to the dartboard by his neck. "You don't never disrespect the darts mate," he says.

In other words, yes, yes, we get it Rick - you're a regular chap. Where's the darts, innit? Christ has there ever been such a self-conscious Prince of the Pub in all the history of the Empire? Keith Talent was a flipping parody for darts' sake - perpetrating this shtick as some version of reality is really, really not asking very much of your audience. On this score, I fault Hatton and his entourage first and foremost for being so beatifically enamored of his laddishness, but I also fault the producers of the show for letting him get away with it. The virtue of the De La Hoya/Mayweather affair was that it managed to probe beneath each fighter's well-manicured self-presentation. In Floyd's case, four episodes taught me all that I need to know. In that nothing much seems to have changed with him (money=good, dad=crazy), this current series is going to live and die with what Hatton brings to the table. And if that continues to be the documentarian's equivalent of a warm pint and a chippie, well, we're all in for a long fortnight lads, a long fortnight indeed.