Television often throws up unpleasant images to surprise you, like finding an earwig in the sugar. The BBC has got the transmission rights for Formula One motor racing, and they were lucky in that the Australian Grand Prix (BBC1, Sunday), which opened the new season, proved a very exciting race, and was won by a Brit. There were lots of crashes, nobody was hurt, and that’s the way we like it.
The commentary seemed much the same as ever, but they have created some high-tech titles for the start which are meant to thrill you with the sheer genius of the engineers who make the cars and the carbon-based life forms that drive them, but really only looked like modern razor ads, which are also very noisy and also try to persuade you that you’re scraping away your bristles with something marginally less advanced than the Voyager spacecraft.
But the thing that really got to me, the adder on the putting green, was the sight of Richard Branson, who had flown out to support the team he sponsors, Brawn.
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