Missing 4 million

Average viewing figures for Sports Personality of the Year, plus winners...

2013 5.6m (Andy Murray)
2012 10.6m (Bradley Wiggins)
2011 4.2m (Mark Cavendish)
2010 6.8m (Tony McCoy)
2009 4.7m (Ryan Giggs)
2008 6.6m (Chris Hoy)
2007 6.8m (Joe Calzaghe)
2006 5.8m (Zara Phillips)
2005 4.9m (Andrew Flintoff)
2004 6.1m (Kelly Holmes)
2003 8.3m (Jonny Wilkinson)
2002 6.6m (Paula Radcliffe)
2001 7.1m (David Beckham)
2000 7.2m (Steve Redgrave)

Truck news

Some six weeks after losing its contract with BBC Sport, SiS, which bought BBC Outside Broadcasts in 2008, has decided to pull out of that part of its business. It is looking for a buyer, and, unless one is found, 230 jobs are at risk from March next year.

CEO Gary Smith said today "We have always sought to be competitive in our pricing, but we have never been prepared to sacrifice quality just in order to deliver a cheaper service. In view of the pricing pressure for long term contacts for customers such as the BBC we have come to the conclusion that the outside broadcast market, as it is today, no longer offers an arena in which it makes sense for us to continue to operate.”

Busy boy

It's all very liberal at Jonathan Wall's 5Live. After the re-hiring of Adrian Chiles, we learn Sunday afternoon presenter Ian Payne keeps his slot, despite his appointment at the start of the month as ITN Sport Correspondent - and alongside his LBC Saturday afternoon show.

Hang on a minute, ITV - aren't Saturday and Sunday afternoons when quite a lot of sport happens ?

Left outside

The outside broadcast units of SIS Live (which took over BBC OBs in 2008) are not required by the BBC Sport from 2014. This is a major move by Barbara Slater and the Sport team, presumably to drive down costs by going for a wider range of providers - but you have to say there has to be a risk to continuity and quality. SIS provided coverage of 9 Olympic venues in 2012, and has done Wimbledon, the London Marathon, Formula 1, athletics, football, rugby union and rugby league for the BBC since the transfer of 15 tv trucks, other assorted vehicles and associated staff off the BBC books five years ago. SIS honoured most BBC terms and conditions in the process - and may be paying the price for that.

A weakening of SIS's capabilities might have other consquences. They also provide trucks for Glastonbury, were there for the Diamond Jubilee - and have previously helped with up to 70 OBs for Election nights.

Here are the new providers selected by BBC Sport.

Athletics – NEP Visions (HQ - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
The Boat Race - CTV (part of the Euro Media Group, formed in 2007 from French and Dutch companies)
Football - CTV
Formula 1 - Presteigne Charter (part of the Avesco Group, HQ in Crawley)
London Marathon - CTV
Ruby League - Telegenic (already working for Sky and BT Sports)
Rugby Union - Telegenic
Tennis – NEP Visions
Wimbledon – NEP Visions

Front row

Whilst most cameras concentrated on friends, family and the Royal Box during breaks in Murray v Djokovic Wimbledon final, some still looked at the players.

Lo, Sophie Raworth (who went to Murray v Federer last year, and donated the ticket price to charity), and yes, Olympic Torch Bearer, former sports rights negotiator and now BBC Director of Operations, Dominic Coles.

Game on

A summer of sporting contests for screen time ahead on BBC News tv bulletins. "Combative" Dan Roan, square-jawed Chief Sports Correspondent, currently reporting standing sideways on the Lions tour, has a new member of his team - ITV sports reporter Natalie Pirks joins Auntie in July.

It's a return to public service broadcasting for Natalie - she was with Grandstand (remember ?) in 2003. Has she acquired the emphatic hand gestures, eye-brow raising and five-word groupings required of modern tv sports analysis ?  Dare Dan take a holiday ?

Olympian

The London Olympics feature, once again, throughout the latest honours list. There's an OBE for Clare Balding; an OBE for Dave Gordon, from BBC Sport, and an MBE for his chief engineer Richard Morgan. Arise, Sir Anish Kapoor, begetter of The Orbit-Twirly-Whirly Thing; Thomas Heatherwick, creator of the 204-flame Bunsen burner-cauldron, becomes a CBE; Kevin Finnan, who choreographed the opening ceremony is made an MBE. Dennis Hone, who was with the ODA from 2006, rose to CEO and now runs Olympic legacy, becomes a CBE.

There are gongs for a range of civil servants who clearly did quite a bit of co-ordination - Mandy Hope, at the MoD, Kathryn Foster at the Home Office/UK Border Force; Ann Wojtowicz at Local Government on legacy; Carolyn Dolan, at the Department of Transport. And bigger gongs for Jonathan Stephens, Permanent Secretary at the DCMS, who, spookily, announced only last month he was moving on. For conspiracy theorists, there's also an honour for Deputy Head of News and DCMS-lifer, Toby Sargent.

The police get three honours - Assistant Commissioner Christopher Allison, who was overall Security Co-ordinator, Met "Gold commander" Bob Broadhurst and Superintendent Brian Pearce. There's an MBE for Wendy Solesbury of the Red Cross; another for Shaun McCarthy, chair of Sustainable London 2012; and one for Penny Briscoe, paralympic performance director. Andrew Finding, CEO of the British Equestrian Federation is awarded an OBE.

I make that 20 Olympic-related honours - on top of the 39 we had at the New Year.

Nothing, yet, for Roger Mosey. I shall consider some BBC honours in another post.

Help with schedules

Maria Miller was tipped for Health and Wales before ending up at the DCMS.  Her first weeks saw some unpleasant tasks - issuing warning of redundancy notices to all her new staff (headed "Your Future") as the Department moves to closure on Jeremy Hunt's cuts plans. 80 civil servants need to volunteer to go by the end of the financial year, otherwise a process of selection-for-retention comes into play. Last year 67 chose an early exit, costing the redundancy pot £3.2m, with an average pay-off of £48,500.

Over three years, the DCMS will have reduced from 590 staff to around 330 (and some of those will be on short-term contracts). And from next year, those 330 move from their remaining three floors of Cockspur Street, away from the 158 Scottish malts in the Whisky Bar of The Albannach opposite, and the DCMS performance space of Trafalgar Square, to the duller surroundings of 100 Parliament Street, opposite the Mitchell Gate to Downing Street. No such cuts in Maria's other department, the Government Equalities Office, where staffing stays at 80 - but an irritating stroll for Maria to the glass factory of Victoria's Eland House, shared with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and Eric Pickles' Communities and Local Government.

Still Maria can have some fun this week - with BBC Chairman Lord Patten and his batman George on parade for a first official meeting. She gave early notice that she expects more tv coverage, and fast, of women's sports.  Space has been created, on daytime BBC2.  Will Barbara Slater have provided the Good Lord with a list sufficient to avoid a talking-to ? And how will the diversity discussion go for George ?  

Let the (minority) games continue

New Culture Secretary Maria Miller has got off on the front foot in the new term with a letter to BBC Chairman Lord Patten caling for more coverage of women's sports.

“The British media has done a simply fantastic job championing the achievements of our female athletes at London 2012. But outside the Olympics and Paralympics, women’s sport has been woefully under-represented on television. In particular, sports where women compete – such as cricket, football, rugby, netball - end up buried pretty deep within the TV schedules, if shown at all. I am writing to urge you to continue to embrace the enthusiasm and inspiration of London 2012 and continue to give space to women’s sport.”

The Trust are already onside for this, having littered their recent re-writes of purpose remits with more prominent references to minority sports. And so is Roger Mosey (BBC Olympics now Vision minder) who's been canvassing, once again, the idea of a dedicated BBC Sports channel. The alternative is to give up space on daytime, if events work that way, and early evening on BBC2. Before the London Olympics, this would have been counter-intuitive - now the mood amongst the scheduling gurus might be that "We can sell this".

Knockout stage

In the middle of all this Olympic joy, spare a thought for two strong women, who've been instrumental in our success, and who will have to fight it out for a job when this is all over.

The Tories' clampdown on quangoes means Sport England and UK Sport have to sort out a merger after these games. Both spend your money (Government grants and lottery funds - with UK Sport also raising some funds through sponsorship) - with Sport England focussed more on strategy and facilities for general sporting participation, and UK Sport more on top talent.

Sport England is led by Jennie Price, a lawyer by training, who's come through the construction industry and running Government recycling schemes, to this job in 2007.







UK Sport's CEO is Liz Nicholl OBE, a netball player who went on to run the sport in England for 16 years, before joining UK Sport first in 1999.

It would nice to think there'd be a role for both of them in the future, if they wanted it.

Rings

Mark Thompson and Lord Patten were enormously pleased with themselves yesterday, securing UK broadcast rights to the Olympic Games of Sochi 2014, Rio 2016, Pyeongchang 2018 and the we-don't-know where games of 2020. But was there genuine competition ?  The games are "Crown Jewels", on the Government list, European Court-endorsed, of sporting events which must be broadcast on "free-to-air" channels. ITV, C4 and 5 will have shown no interest, but the Telegraph thinks Sky were testing the water with some idea of buying up the lot, then letting the BBC - or someone else - have most of it.

In Italy, Sky Italia bought the rights to Vancouver 2010 and the 2012 Games for some £90 million, on condition that it sub-licensed a minimum number of hours of coverage to the free-to-air television state broadcaster RAI. RAI will pay Sky £24.2 million for a total of 315 hours of coverage of the two events. (The BBC broadcast 160 hours of Vancouver; NBC are offering Americans 272 hours of London) Sky Italia, RAI, and Berlusconi's Mediaset are in a continuing legal battle over live football coverage.

More likely, the Sky approach here may have been based on their Australian experience, where Foxtel took advantage of a battle between free-to-air channels. They partnered with the Nine Network to win the 2010/2012 rights, biffing the Seven channel who had been Australia's Olympic broadcaster since 1992. Nine gets more than 300 hours of live coverage from London. Foxtel are promising eight channels of coverage, plus "every Gold Medal live", and have an app for subscribers. And, yes, Rupert Murdoch is trying to win a bigger stake in Foxtel and Fox Sports.

Nonetheless, before we endorse the BBC triumph, it would be sensible to KNOW there was a challenge. And anyway, the BBC's Charter only runs to 2016, doesn't it ?

Net call

Beezer share and hours figures for BBC1 for the week July 2nd to 8th: 26% share with an average 7.22 hours. Drama ? Reality shows ? No, the final week of Wimbledon. No wonder Mr Cohen kept moving it to BBC1.  Last year's comparable figures were 24.8% and 6.31 hours.

Murray-Federer even boosted things for ESPN in America: a rating of 2.9 - equivalent to 4m viewers. That's up from 2.1 for Djokovic-Nadal on NBC last year, but short of the the 4.2 for Nadal beating American Andy Roddick in 2009.

Other networks are available

A cynic might suggest Radio 2 Controller Bob Shennan, sports journalist for 13 years, was having withdrawal symptoms, and needed to get into the Olympic Stadium. Radio Today reports that Radio 2 will now join in the frolics, with a special evening show to be hosted by noted sports fanatics Zoe Ball and Richard Bacon.

A spokesman said "The brilliant Zoe Ball and Richard Bacon cap off Radio 2’s Olympic celebrations with a glitzy evening music and entertainment show. There’ll be lots of live music and even livelier chat, and we’ll make sure we get all the gossip backstage at the Games".

I fully expect that Radio 4 will soon reveal that the Shipping Forecast is to come live from Weymouth for the duration.

The media marathon

Selected timings...

Michel Roux 3.54

Will Perry - 5Live Sport - 3.54

Sophie Raworth - 3.56

Mark Hutchings - 5Live News - 4.06

Rachael Hodges - 5Live News - 4.36

Mrs Mark Hutchings - 5.04

Susanna Reid - 5.12

Ed Balls - 5.33

Notoriety

A poll by the website GiveMeFootball - 78% chose our favourite newsreader, while 3% got the right answer.

They didn't think you cared...

This week you will be severely marketed by the BBC. Olympic torch coverage, The Voice and Engelbert Humperdinck.

No room to shed tears over the loss of tv coverage of all British horse-racing to Channel 4.  They hope. The Grand National has been televised by the BBC since 1960.  Last year the live transmission caught the attention of nearly 9 million viewers, and BBC Worldwide sold rights to 140 countries, garnering an estimated audience of 600 million. 

BBC horse-racing has been brought to you by indie Sunset + Vine since 2004, under Jeff Foulser.  Their parent company is Tinopolis.  Channel 4 Racing's current provider is the rather smaller Highflyer Group, based at Teddington, run by Simon Moorhead, with Andrew Franklin and John Fairley.  Expect a tough tender battle next year.  

Rip Off Ou Quoi ?

Statistician Graeme Archer enters the debate about gender at the BBC - sparked by articles in which it was revealed that Julia Somerville, Gloria Hunniford and Angela Rippon get around £1,000 each per episode of "Rip Off Britain", whilst it seems to work out at around £40,000 for the pleasure of Alan Hansen's thoughts on each Match of The Day.  And the audience is sometimes bigger for "Rip Off Britain".

Here's the core of Graeme's argument.

"There are plenty of men who present programmes about buying things, surely? And I'm sure I've seen women talking on sports programmes. It would only be sexism if either the BBC refused to let women do sport or men do consumer affairs, or, since they do permit the genders to mix within genre, if the within-genre pay was set lower for women than men. Now, that might be the case (which the BBC could address by doing what it ought to have done years ago, and telling us how our money is spent). But the fact that there are two uni-gender programmes of different genres doesn't tell us whether it is the case or not, and nor does the price per presenter within a genre tell us anything of institutional instinct, either: it may just be that there are more people available to read an autocue with regard to broken washing machines, than there are to comment on the fascinating world of competitive sport. 


Unless, of course, the BBC lost a high profile sexism/ageism case last year, and decided to make amends by cobbling together a programme about the perils of buying white goods, to be presented "at random" (where "at random" means "not at all at random") by three older female presenters, and subconsciously decided not to pay them very much as a deferred insult. Absence of evidence, after all, isn't evidence of… etc etc"

jaw-jaw

The SNP are lining up to give Lord Patten a kicking when he visits Edinburgh this week. What they say they want is an acknowledgement that BBC Chief Political Advisor Ric Bailey was just wrong when he ruled that Alex Salmond shouldn't feature on tv and radio "panels" ahead of the Scotland v England Rugby match. What they really want is more control over the shaping of the tv debate ahead of the independence referendum.

Joan McAlpine, in today's Scotsman, adds her voice that of Scotsman editor John McLellan and former BBC Governor Jeremy Peat in demanding a so-called "Scottish Six" - a tv bulletin of world, UK and Scottish news, written and presented in Scotland.  And Joan is also unhappy that our Ric, along with the BBC's head of UK News, Gary Rogers, are on a BBC "high-level, senior group [formed] to discuss and plan the coverage of the referendum”, along with BBC Scotland Head of News and Current Affairs John Boothman.  Joan deems him "a controversial figure because of his past links to the Labour Party".

Poor old Ric. His reaction was probably an ancient twinge. The BBC is always uncomfortable about party leaders appearing on "patsy" programmes. In 2005, Tony Blair made it past the advisors and onto the sofa of Football Focus, proclaiming, dodgily, undying support for Newcastle United as a child. Alex Salmond, in his First Minister web page, doesn't list rugby union in his interests - he claims to be a fan of Heart of Midlothian and Scotland (round ball).

Shocking

The usually well-informed Charlie Sale in The Mail reports that Alan Hansen will soon sign a new much-reduced contract to opine on Match Of The Day. It's currently thought to be worth around £1.5m p.a. Until the Great Move North, the BBC also had to pay to get Mr Hansen home from White City to Southport - a road journey of nearly four hours.

For a standard Saturday, Hansen would have to leave the seaside around 1100, watch a selection of games, potter round the edit suites until on air around 2230, thence home maybe 0300 - a 16 hour shift if you count the travel.  Now, with a 45 minute potter to Salford Quays, the day, including travel, comes down to 12 hours.

However, my guess is that the cut in pay will be closer to 50% than 25%.

Five lives on

The BBC Trust have staved off the challenge from the TalkSport corner, seeking a TKO of chat, banter. celebrities and comedians on Radio 5Live.  The station's current service licence requires that 75% of programming should be "news"; the Trust offers no measurement of its own in its review published today, but in future asks the BBC to define which IT thinks are the news shows, declare them, make sure they add up to 75% of the output - and then ensure they have fewer "non-news" items. "Discussion and other feature items should have a clear news or topical impetus."  A line that might be soon pinned up in Richard Bacon's studio.

In other changes, Radio 5Live's remit will be defined as offering "breaking news" rather than "continuous news". This may require a meeting between Controller Adrian Van Klaveren and the BBC's Head of Newsgathering, Fran Unsworth, who's recently ruled that between 6am and 9am, correspondents with a new story go straight to Today.

And the Trust have eased up on the sort of audience 5Live should chase, from "young and diverse", to "broad". This reflects some current realities - the average age of the station's listeners is 47. 5Live reaches 500k black and ethnic minority listeners a week - 7.5%, not good, but a higher proportion than the BBC's other analogue network stations.

There'll be a little more scrabbling on the sports side of the station - with high risk of a return to daft live radio commentaries on table tennis, bowls, and darts. Here's the new remit:  5 live should offer live commentary, as well as news and other programming, on at least 20 sports from around the world across the year. Coverage should be a mixture of one-off events and regular programming. Sports output – including in peak listening hours – should cover a wide range of sports, including those of minority interest. This action will be implemented immediately. We have asked BBC management to publicly set out its commitment to a range of sports at the beginning of each year through the statements of programme policy.