Congratulations is once again due to Sky for its excellent coverage of the Help for Heroes rugby from Twickenham on Saturday. Because of Sky's involvement - and that of the other sponsors - all the £1.1m raised from the ticket sales went to the charity for injured servicemen, for whom, unfortunately, the statutory authorities seem all too ready to neglect.
I'm constantly frustrated that Sky does not exploit its rights to live Premiership rugby to the full although this has been tempered somewhat by its support of this cause and by the fact that ITV has seized the opportunity to run a highlights package on ITV4 on Sunday, which is something that was open to the BBC but it chose to ignore.
The BBC also chose to ignore the Help for Heroes game in any of its news and sports coverage, which I think is pretty shameful.
It seems to me that unless you are interested in the Notting Hill Carnival (note to BBC TV presenters - the word ‘carnival', much like ‘medal', is not a verb and therefore should not be used as such) or the Glastonbury festival, there are pretty thin pickings on the BBC. But then again, this is just another example of deliberate neglect by our statutory broadcasting authority.
