Me Blog!

From November ITV will no longer have the broadcasting rights for Formula 1 motor racing. Beginning in November the rights will go to the BBC which is a rather excellent thing for us spectators as the BBC don’t have adverts.

I stayed up last weekend to watch the Australian GP live and it was my 13th year hoping that maybe ITV might improve its broadcasting. Overall ITV’s broadcast was pretty excellent. Martin Brundle is an outstanding commentator and the rest of the crew are enjoyable and knowledgable and do add to the presentation. With the exception however of James Allen. He is probably the most annoying sports commentator in the world. How or why they promoted him from a pit lane correspondant to race commentator is beyond me.

Anyway, although I was hoping this year might be different for ITV, it seemed that I was hoping for too much. It seems that for the ITV bosses, the actual racing itself was just an annoyance to them and only served as an interruption to the broadcasting of adverts. A prime case in point is that as soon as a race starts you can be 99.99% certain that ITV will cut to an ad break within the first 5 laps.  Whenever they do cut to an ad break they seem to have the uncanny knack of missing a huge event in the race. I remember a few years ago during a rainy Belgian Grand Prix, they cut to an ad break. I switched over to RTE only so see Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari smash into the back of David Coulthards McLaren. I flicked back to ITV and they were still on an ad break. As soon as they resumed commentary no mention was made of the incident and then as if by magic they made time reverse and the accident ‘Just happened’!  I flicked over to RTE and saw that there was something like 20 laps left in the race, I flicked back to ITV and there were 25! Then ITV went to another ad break and when they came back, there was parity again!

So it’s great that the BBC will be showing uninterrupted races again. I hope they also manage to negotiate with the current presenters too. Except for James Allen of course. As for ITV, they can now go back to forcing relentless ‘reality’ drivel on the mindless masses and continue rigging phone and text competitions.