The Five or Six Nations on TV, strictly Saturdays only then, conjures up the Borders burr of Bill McLaren, who came more than anyone warranted the title, the ‘Voice of Rugby’.
Other great broadcasters illuminated the oval-ball world. There were the lilting tones of a Welsh miner’s son Cliff Morgan, who delivered the sport’s most iconic line ‘What a score!’ when Gareth Edwards put the final brushstroke on that Barbarian masterpiece at Cardiff Arms Park in 1973.
Ian Robertson, on BBC radio, was the provider of an equally memorable verbal jewel as Jonny Wilkinson ‘drops for World Cup glory… It’s up, it’s over, he’s done it.’
It is against this backdrop of nostalgia that we learn the disturbing news that tomorrow – on a Thursday, ahem – ITV will show adverts during the Six Nations opener between France and Ireland, and for the remainder of the Championship. And so another incursion on the enjoyment of the armchair viewer is rammed through the nation’s sitting rooms.
ITV wonder how this will go down with fans. It hardly needs a crystal ball or a polling company to work that one out, guys.
It will be a distraction and an damn unwelcome one.
ITV will show adverts during games in this year’s Six Nations, Daily Mail Sport understands
The historic tournament kicks off on Thursday night as Ireland visit reigning champions France
Yes, ITV say the adverts will be aired during breaks in play and over a split screen, so you will miss nothing. But if there is value attached to the quality of the product, of the pictures and the words, how can the counter-feature of Samsung and Virgin Atlantic adverts be an enhancement for the viewer?
It is not as though there is not enough space for adverts before the match and at half time and at the end of it. That is what ad breaks are for, no?
One fears mission creep. Will this become the new norm? Will ever more ads be shoe-horned in. If you run two per half, as they plan to do this year, why not four, or six, or eight?
This is the precipice you reach when the BBC have turned their back on huge swathes of our sporting landscape and a significant part of their heritage.
From the Premier League to the Grand National to the Derby to Royal Ascot to the Cheltenham Festival to the Ryder Cup to the Open – all lost to the Beeb. Formula One and England test cricket have both gone. The Boat Race, too.
And as for the Six Nations, the BBC will not broadcast one England match this year. All those fall to ITV and their advert-fest. The very commercial station have 10 matches in all.
As my colleague Mike Keegan reports, the Beeb will broadcast the rest of the games, including three each of Wales and Scotland fixtures under the terms of a four-year deal signed in 2025.
When the BBC waste so much money on fripperies, why do they turn their back on sport – including not sending staff to the early stages of this year’s World Cup, by the way?
It hardly needs a crystal ball or a polling company to work out how this will go down with fans
ITV say the adverts will be aired during breaks – but it’ll be a distraction and an unwelcome one
Their dereliction of duty to the sports-loving licence-fee payer is at the root of this money-grabbing, dumbed-down spectacle. Certainly, a situation the modest McLaren, handing out his Hawick balls, would not have recognised.
Thus an institution as venerable as the Six Nations – one based on tradition and the oldest of rivalries – is devalued by the heathens at the Beeb and the admen obsessives of ITV.
