BernieVision not for me

13 April 2012

Never mind the weekend launch of BBC Four. The most significant broadcasting event of recent days was the advent of Formula One Digital Plus, or BernieVision. Who wants to watch a Grand Prix for free on ITV when you could cough up 12 quid for the privilege on Sky? Now you can, thanks to that awfully nice Mr Ecclestone.

Make no mistake, Digital Plus has very little to do with Sky and a great deal to do with F1's ringmaster. Sky are simply the service provider to the viewers. They do not produce the pictures, except for a few bits of extra pitlane coverage which were deeply uninspired.

Digital Plus is all part of Bernie Ecclestone's plan to take over the universe.

Ultimately he controls its output. Hence the driver interviews on tap and unique access inside the team garages. All the pictures seen on ITV are completely different, providedby the local broadcasting network-in the host country of each race.

Digital Plus has been available to petrolheads in France and Germany for a couple of seasons now, but the start of the new F1 season in Melbourne marked its arrival in Britain.

What you get principally is simply hours and hours of coverage. You too can witness four practice sessions over the Thursday and Friday of a race weekend. You too can witness two warm-up sessions ahead of qualifying on Saturday, and again on race day.

Point of order, Mr Speaker . . . Actually until a couple of years back you could see all that stuff on Eurosport without paying any extra, so possibly it's not as revolutionary as all that. And while it may be a tad unsporting to say so, even fervent followers of F1 sometimes lose the will to live watching practice and warm-up.

But let us move on to the unique selling point of Digital Plus, which is that it is interactive.

Armchair sports followers are old hands at this by now, so when it all kicked off with the first practice session late last Thursday night GMT, we knew that pressing the red button on the handset would bring up a menu of eight mini-screens on the television, each offering a different viewing option.

One screen offered the normal type of race coverage to commentary from the excellent pair of Ben Edwards and John Watson, who were easily the best part of the Digital-Plus coverage. Another offered the same race pictures accompanied by idle chit-chat from Damon Hill (although only during qualifying and the race - he didn't dirty his hands with practice and warmup), alongside a cheeky-chappie ex-F1 driver called Perry McCarthy who was as irritating as he was obscure, and host Matthew Lorenzo who was clearly still uncertain which way up your average F1 car goes.

We saw a lot of this triumvirate in what was obviously a London studio, sitting behind a peculiar desk which came up to their armpits.

Back on interactive you could opt to see highlights of events so far, or view some complicated data which must have been hieroglyphics to the inexperienced eye.

Alternatively you could follow the leading racers, or some worthy tussle behind the leaders, or scrutinise the pitlane, or see various driver's eye views.

Annoyingly, opting for any of these last four meant losing race commentary, leaving scant sense of the developments leading to Michael Schumacher's victory.

The question is whether so much more is necessarily better.

Petrolheads who cough up £200 to attend a single race will presumably think the same price a bargain for a whole season's wall-to-wall viewing. I found it a pain hopping about between viewing options and mostly stuck with Edwards and Watson's informative commentary.

But while it was enjoyable to sample F1 interactive, the troublesome fact is this - ITV's coverage remains of superlative quality, not to mention free.

I don't know whether I would pay £12 to watch Digital Plus again. But I'll gladly pay nothing to watch Jim Rosenthal and company for as long as they're around.

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BernieVision not for me

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