F1 on ITV - advertsing gone daft

F1 on ITV has to rank as the one of the worst slaves to advertisers, possibly coming second only to all the crime/drama programmes ruined by the endless AXA sponsor tags that ITV sold its soul to.

Qualifying has been mode boring enough by the change to this daft multi-session format produced to supposedly make it more ‘interesting’ (for which read ’short sessions to allow adverts to be jammed in without having to find a gap in all that inconvenient qualifying stuff that is getting in the way of the ad breaks’), and what used to be a programme that took little more than the old ‘Qualifying Hour’ has now grown into a 2 hour plus grind of  tittle tattle about the drivers, teams, managers, and the sport (and of course, the ad-breaks).

Selling out to money-mad Sony as sponsors was never going to be good, and we now have the pleasure of eac ad-break being punctuated with a plug at each end for ITV, F1, some driver’s face, Sony, and some crappy piece of music they’ve chosen, which appropriately features the word ‘Madness’ in its interminably repeated showings.

The programme segments aren’t even worth staying still long enough to watch in some cases. I made the mistake of getting up to investigate a noise at my door just as one part of the qualifying programmed began after the blasted Sony music - I only had to wander to the door, check there was nobody there, or anything suspicious happening, and wander back to my seat - I don’t own a mansion, but in the time it took to do that, when I sat down again, all I was treated to was the blasted Sony ‘Madness’ score yet again, and another batch of adverts.

Why bother squeezing in a programme section of a minute or two? Just make it all adverts and at least we’d know we had time to go make tea or coffee, or write War & Peace, while the ads were on!