Open letter to BBC Sport

The strength of feeling expressed in public forums by Formula One fans about the broadcast rights deal with Sky from 2012 indicates just how betrayed they feel by what is a significant reduction in the free to air coverage of the sport in the UK.

In summary, broadcast will be shared between Sky and BBC, with all weekend sessions on Sky and half the races and associated practice and qualifying sessions on the BBC. Those races not broadcast live on the BBC will be presented as a highlights package later on, in the way Match of the Day summarises Premier League football.

To watch a full season of live Formula One, a fan will have to take a subscription to Sky Sports at around £500 a year.

Maybe I'm not typical, but this has a profound effect on three generations of my family. I am a long time Formula One fan - not fanatical but I haven't missed a race unless under duress for nearly 20 years. The ITV coverage, while interrupted (German commercial tv, incidentally, carries the race in an onscreen window during ad breaks), was good but I welcomed the move back to BBC and the professionalism I hoped the Corporation could bring to the coverage. I was not disappointed. Race weekends have been special, particularly for the flyaway races. getting up at unreasonable hours, putting my McLaren merchandise on and enjoying the coverage has been an important part of my enjoyment of the sport. I cannot afford to attend races, I feel resentful that the implication is that 'true fans' would go to races or pay the Sky subscription. I am a fan, my status as fan is not for others to decide. My daughter, at 21, is in the middle of her studies at university. Her aim is to find employment in Formula One and all her studies and extra-curricular work is geared to this end. She writes free practice, qualifying and race reviews for her own website and race reports for a respected Formula One website. All of this relies on free access to the action as it happens, something she will no longer be able to afford from 2012. My mother, at 86, enjoys Formula One as much as we do. While not fanatical, she sits with us and has an engaged and knowledgeable enjoyment of the sport.

Not one of the three of us can afford the Sky subscription. As a fan, I would find it difficult to watch half the the races live and would have no intention of skulking around on the weekends that the BBC did not broadcast live hoping to avoid overhearing any results and spoiling my enjoyment of the spectacle.

So that's three committed viewers less, straight away.

Some questions:

1. Why did BBC knowingly enter into a contract with the rights holders originally, knowing how much it would cost, only to withdraw from it with a year and a half to go on a 'cost savings' excuse?
2. What, if any, consultation was there with any interested parties, viewer groups or fan fora about the proposed changes to the contract and any resulting broadcast proposals?
3. From a viewer/licence payer's perspective, how on earth can the resulting mix of live coverage and highlights be considered an acceptable solution?

Questions the BBC will not be able to answer is to what extent did the rights holders engage with other free to air broadcasters? Did the BBC hold onto an clearly inferior offering in order to prevent another free to air broadcaster entering a contract?

The only winners here are Formula One Management and their investors. Sky will not inherit the BBC audience (100% non-uptake in this household), however professional their coverage.

Finally, the parallel with Premier League football is irrelevant and a distraction. I support Newcastle United but with a pay tv subscription I could not guarantee seeing my team play every Saturday, as there would be many matches competing for screen time. With Formula One my team is onscreen every race.

Formula One was an award-winning jewel in BBC Sports portfolio. The proposed output for fans - and the way it has been handled and reported, with none of the team (bar one quip) empowered to voice an opinion on air - has been a slap in the face for fans who are licence payers. The official response on the BBC complaints blog has been that 'some' fans have expressed opinions. Not from where I have been sitting. I have seen a high and sustained level of anger and disappointment which the BBC choose to ignore. If Barbara Slater is 'delighted' by this outcome, how come the good news wasn't even mentioned in the Hungary qualifying coverage? That's a rhetorical question, as it is clear the BBC did not anticipate the depth and sustained nature of the backlash and are now embarrassed by the outcome of their negotiations.

Shame on you BBC. Shame on you.

Peter Hough

Wildebeest

To my own credit (I think), I have tried to neither like nor dislike something because 'everyone else' likes or dislikes it. Fashion, for instance, is a mystery to me. Not just couture but fads of all kinds. I cannot find a way squaring that circle, of understanding how you can express your individuality by being the same as everyone else. Not that a shared enthusiasm for something is a bad thing. I am an almost lifelong Newcastle United supporter without even knowing why. I could - and maybe should - have chosen a more successful team.

Can't remember when I last bought a major item of clothing on a whim, haven't knowingly owned branded footwear for nearly thirty years. I know how tyrannous label nazism is, I have three daughters.

I know how we could debate endlessly the semiotics of branded goods, how brand values transfer and make lifestyle and status implications about their wearers/owners. I don't give a fuck about any of that. But as a human activity it bemuses me.

Human beings seem to crave acceptance. Acceptance springs from conspicuous ownership. This is the antithesis of individuality. I can't think of a single exceptional human being who has devoted themselves to a brand without being paid to do so.

And there's the heart of this little essay right there: 'exceptional'. How can anyone be satisfied by being part of the herd, by being one of the sheeple? As the old joke goes (and I first saw it in Hull University's rag mag Hullabaloo in 1972) 'eat shit, forty billion flies can't be wrong'. Maybe some kinds of shit are better than others, I don't know. But I ain't eating it.

Because blogging is a me-dium, I shall end my little rant as I began, by talking about me. If it comes down to a simple choice between being out of step with the herd or standing in a line outside a closed shop, waiting to buy some new thing that won't make a jot of difference to my life, I'll choose being out of step. I won't waste my time or resources trying to be like anyone else or trying to find comfort in the company of people like me. I don't need that validation. If punk rock taught me anything (irony of ironies - punk is painted as a movement/fashion/musical styling now) it's that you can only be oppressed and manipulated if you give your consent to it. I'm not suggesting my way is a better way. Just different.

Talk to the toe

I used to scoff at 'old' people who asserted confidently that pains in their arthritic joints presaged changes in weather.

Some years ago I crushed the bones in one big toe. I woke in the last night with a pain in that toe and today it snowed after a mild spell. This is not the first time my toe has predicted a change in weather. The lesson? Pay attention to what old people tell you. Some of it is useful.

The changing of the year

I'm sitting in my mother's house, it's just past 9pm on the last night of the year. I'm tired because I had a late night last night and I'm sitting here watching the worst television, drinking a bottle of wine and writing this blog because, frankly, I'm bored.

What is it about New Year's Eve that has turned it into an endurance event? I know it's not the world, it's me.

I sense changes afoot for 2011 but no resolutions.

Happy New Year.

No Cowell Bitch, Me

While the nation decided, without any sense of irony (see below), which forgettable Cowell cash cow to promote over the other, I was ramping up some enthusiasm for playing a few songs myself. Not to millions of slavering, television-fixated fuckwits, but to a bar full of real people. Yes, here is the news - music is alive and well, despite the best efforts of The High-Trousered One. And let's not have any post-X Factor whines of 'I only watched ironically' - the viewers and voters are complicit in the misery now to be unleashed on our unprotected ears. Mercifully it'll all be over by Xmas + 10. Oh, and here's a prediction. X-Factor Matt's second album, around this time next year, will be a forgettable mish mash of self-penned ditties, written from the sanctuary of rehab.

No, what my little foray into open mic territory has proved is that you could throw a net over any group of 50 people and get one X Factor final-quality performer. This means that all of this bullshit is just a big musical lottery show. Imagine going through all that only to find the public like you less than a cuddly painter and decorator. The 'it could be you' strapline is more appropriate for X Factor than it is for the Lotto.

You might think that as a middle-aged man still playing at playing, this might be sour grapes, a lament for my never-started music career. I have always been around much better musicians than myself. My own brother, for one - a prodigious talent who, it would appear, can play anything with a keyboard or strings and compose orchestral works or play concert grade piano. He teaches music. He IS music. That has cast a long shadow over my own noodlings which I have never really escaped. But he's just one. I have a lot of friends who are simply excellent musos. Some play, some don't. As for myself, I have no illusions. I'm a mid-table, second division bass player and a Vauxhall Conference (or whatever the lower divisions are called now) guitarist. I know it, my friends know it. I don't let it hold me back.

Tonight, however, I finally felt validated. I got to play with 'Doc' Doherty of the mighty Xdreamysts. That's proper NI New Wave royalty right there. I have his records, and I told him so. And tonight he joined us, on a stage, to jam some songs to real people.

So Mr Cowell - while you're selling your anodyne, vanilla-flavoured pap as some kind of significant cultural moment, I have been down with the resistance. We'll be back.

NaNoWriMo

I'm completely absorbed in National Novel Writing Month, even if it has imposed some strange and harsh disciplines on me. The aim is to write an original novel of 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. At first glance, my reaction was suitably Clarksonian - how hard CAN it be?

The answer is very hard indeed. The nanowrimo (sic) site offers lots of fancy tools to tell you how you're doing, or not. You can paste your output into a widget and it tells you - in my experience at least - how far behind target you are. The initial maths is easy. You have to write around 1660 words a day, every day. Of course, every day is different. You think 'I'll do a lot at the weekend and catch up'. That would be fine if it was a mechanical process but, dammit, you're writing a novel. there's a creative process behind it all. You have to people your novel with characters and situations that have some kind of authenticity. If you lose sight of this, you might as well just cut and paste 'blah blah blah' over and over.

So when my alarm goes off at 6.30am, I'm already resentful of the tyranny the daily target has imposed upon me. I hope, that by osmosis, a great idea has occurred to me while I have been asleep. In my dressing gown and sucking on the first tea of the day, I batter away for an hour until it's time to get ready for work. At lunchtime, like a compulsive exerciser, I have to get some more words down. I go home, eat my tea, do whatever I have to do and get back to it. Usually after 1am I collapse into bed, having checked if I have made any ground on the target.

I will complete in time, even though my graph of achievement flatlines twice for days on end. On a good day, I could rattle off four or even five thousand words. On that kind of form I could nanowrimo in ten days.

Is my novel any good? Probably not. I'm not doing this again. Probably.

I can't help thinking that the number of words in this blog would have taken me over my daily target had they been nano words. Acording to the widget, I'll complete on Dec 7th. Watch this space!

It's growing ...

Our Nigerian chum returns 12 Google results. Details in a day or so. ...