So thick and fast after the Boat Race came ITV’s coverage of the Malaysian Grand Prix this morning. Now I make no secret of my disinterest in the engineering competition sport. There’s little to no overtaking, and new rules are introduced and dropped on a whim. This season there seems to be something about different types of tyres that have to be used. I’d look it up, but you know what? I just don’t care.
But if it’s on, and I’m in, and there’s nothing else to watch, well…
Anyway, as I tuned in this morning after 9.00am, there was a potential McLaren one-two finish on the cards with new British driver (and F1’s first black competitor) looking to finish second after his third place podium finish at the first race of the season. This he duly did in a tense finish holding off Raikkonen for the last few laps. Truth be told, it was only because my clock radio came on with coverage that my interest was piqued.
After F1 races there’s always a farcical “news conference” where a nameless Brit asks questions in English to each of the drivers in turn. Since he’s F1 approved, there’s never anything too controversial. The drivers have all dutifully put on their sponsored baseball caps and wear their sponsored watches – an attendant is on hand to make sure. Then they say nothing too extraordinary or contentious to the waiting millions.
It is nonsense, but you might hope we could at least hear what young Lewis Hamilton had to say. Not on ITV though.
It was getting closer to 10am so we left the “press conference” (surely a true press conference allows various members of the press to ask the questions? Otherwise isn’t it a “press statement”?) to get a brief interview with Hamilton’s father with the uber-bland Steve Rider. All very well, except we left mid-conversation with Lewis Hamilton himself!
It was quite abysmal timing.
They only had to hang on another three minutes to get the full interview. Fortunately Five Live was covering it much more fully, and were prepared to delay the 10am news by a couple of minutes to let us hear what he had to say. He told us, for example, that he’d run out of onboard water about halfway through the race in the extreme conditions, leaving a very uncomfortable race to the finish.
I suppose the only thing to be said for ITV ending their coverage on time was the fact that it was to make way for 55 minutes of cartoons – it’s rare, after all, for them to carry any children’s programming these days. Of course even that’s not the full story. As the race started around 7am, it ate into valuable GMTV airtime, and that’s airtime that has to be made up by ITV plc – a separate company. So this was GMTV make-weight airtime.
(By the way, it must be said that overall, the race direction was pretty atrocious with processions of cars at the front of the race being shown in favour of anything interesting occuring towards the back of the field).