Must we really be forced to sign up with Sky?

THE brinkmanship is wonderful to behold. On the one hand, ITV Digital says the Football League must - absolutely must - make concessions over the two sides' contract for televising games. Otherwise, the broadcaster hints, its parent companies, Carlton and Granada, will have to consider pulling the plug on the whole digital shebang.

We'll agree to nothing of the sort, say the footie folk. Indeed, we can't. To give up more than a penny piece of TV money would threaten the very existence of dozens of football clubs. Think of the ground staff, the players, the footballers' wives.

Judging by the reaction last week of Carlton's and Granada's share prices, the stock market has started to veer towards the view that the two companies will indeed pull the plug on ITV Digital. The nightmare that has already cost them £800m will be at an end.

Maybe. But if they do and ITV Digital becomes insolvent, there is one absolute certainty - lawyers will grow fat arguing about whether the two parent companies should pick up the bills left behind by a bust ITV Digital.

Also, despite the Government's attempts to remain aloof, it must be worried - not about ITV Digital as such, but the threat to digitial terrestrial television generally. Must we really be forced to sign up with Rupert Murdoch's Sky or put our trust in the financially frail Telewest or NTL to join the digital revolution?

By the end of last week, there were signs that ITV Digital and the Football League were adopting a marginally less confrontational, slightly more emollient stance towards one another. But expect more brinkmanship before the final act of this saga is played out.

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OH dear, will Barclays never learn? It is just two years since it received a public kicking over branch closures, just as chief executive Matt Barrett was appointed on a handsome salary. And now? The big four banks - not just Barclays - are being told by Gordon Brown that they have been beastly to small and medium-sized businesses and that they must offer a better deal. And at the same time, institutional investors are being encouraged to be more active in monitoring and controlling how companies keep their executives happy (for which read well-paid).

Yet just look at the way Barclays has handled the award of a new contract for Barrett. As late as last Tuesday, the bank's chairman, Sir Peter Middleton, was meeting one of Barclays' largest investors and assuring them that Barrett's new contract had not been signed and details were still to be sorted out.

On Wednesday - just 24 hours later - details of the contract were announced. Little sign here of lengthy and thoughtful debate about what was the right package to retain Barrett's services and what shareholders might be happy to accept.

Furthermore, a separate institutional investor was faxed a copy of the contract before it was signed and asked to comment. Could the shareholder please read it through and give a verdict within, oh, about an hour?

This is ludicrous. Matt Barrett is a personable chap, and no one seems to be suggesting that he is doing a bad job. It is possible he is worth every penny of the £15 million that he might conceivably make over the coming three years - to hit this maximum, Barclays would have to perform phenomenally well, and presumably shareholders would feel happy about paying him so huge a sum if he had by then also made them much richer.

No, the real issue here is whether Barclays really is giving its large shareholders the chance to fulfil the duties required of them. Allowing a fund manager an hour to squint at a fax is emphatically not sufficient to ensure good corporate governance.

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LISTEN this week for the crash of kitchen sinks being lobbed around as Woolworths reports its maiden set of results as an independent company. It seems that chairman Gerald Corbett and new boy Trevor Bish-Jones, lured from Dixons to take the chief executive's job last week, are using this opportunity to have a final financial clear-out before they embark on rebuilding.

The company is likely to report a headline profits figure of perhaps £15 million. But that will be before one-off items likely to total much, much more. The company will write off the cost of e-commerce ventures set up when such things were fashionable. It will swallow further write-downs on a few stores and a warehouse. And there is the small matter of a few million in administrative costs charged by its former parent, Kingfisher.

Make no mistake, Corbett and Bish-Jones intend to scrub Woolworths' balance sheet absolutely squeaky clean. This will, after all, be the last chance to do so before they have to start shouldering full responsibility for the company's performance.