Furious Golf Fans as BBC Prefers Airing Repeats than Open

[Teddy Bear]

There's only one British Open golf championship a year, and all the top golfers in the world compete in it. This year it is played at the home of golf - St. Andrews. Because of rain and strong winds delays forced the championship to be extended another day, with today being the final day. This is the last year in which the BBC will be covering this tournament, as they have lost future coverage to Sky.

So how well do the BBC respond, especially given that it is the beginning of school holidays? Well judge for yourselves. Note how the BBC justify their decision.

Furious golf fans hit out as BBC prefers repeats of Homes Under The Hammer and The Rockford Files to climax of The Open

• Viewers feel hugely let down by broadcaster not showing final day of golf
• Blasted the BBC, who pay £7million a year to host Open Championship
• Missing out on the likes of Graeme McDowell and Paul Laurie's last rounds
• BBC say they will use best of their resources to allow fans to follow action

By Euan McLelland For MailOnline

Golf fans have vented their rage at the BBC after channel bosses opted to broadcast repeats of Homes Under the Hammer and Heir Hunters instead of live coverage of the final day of the Open Championship.

Hundreds of viewers hit out as they were forced to miss seventy of the world's greatest players battle for the Claret Jug at the Old Course in St Andrews.

Play was scheduled to conclude yesterday, but heavy rain delays on both Friday and Saturday led to Sunday's final round being carried over to the Monday for only the second time in the tournament's 144 year history.

However, instead of showing the action as it unfolded live from 7.30am this morning, the BBC favoured repeats of the likes of Homes Under the Hammer, Heir Hunters and 1970s series The Rockford Files.

It meant 35 pairings - including British stars Paul Casey, Jamie Donaldson, Graeme McDowell and Paul Lawrie - were all missed teeing-off on their final round, with more than a dozen groups completing their deciding day's golf before BBC1 began broadcasting.

Armchair supporters reacted with fury, taking to Twitter to voice their frustration.

Geoff Critchley tweeted: 'Heir Hunters and Bargain Hunt. More important to the BBC than The Open. Thank goodness Sky will be taking over.'

Another viewer, Kelvin Gomez, said: 'This is the reason why Sky will have the rights to the Open next year - a sad finale for the BBC.'

Under the terms of the BBC's current deal with the R&A, they pay £7million a year for the rights to broadcast the prestigious championship.

However, that arrangement ends next year, with subscription service Sky taking over from 2017.

Former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, a huge golf fan, has already taken aim at the BBC's coverage of the tournament.

In writing for the Dundee Courier, he said: ''The production values and the lack of understanding of the interests of real golf fans which really show up the Beeb as second rate.

'The camera shots and angles are poor compared to the sustained excellence of the US PGA Tour coverage that we can see every weekend on Sky.'

The Open's leaders - which include current world number two Jordan Speith - will not start play until after the BBC coverage begins.

The national broadcaster insisted golf fans will not 'miss any of the key action'.

A spokeswoman said: 'The BBC has brought unprecedented coverage of this year's Open to the widest possible, free-to-air audience - with extended scheduling across all days of competition, including two extra hours on both Friday and Saturday.

'Our key aim today is to fully tell the most important story - who will win the Open - and make the very best use of our resources on this extra day's play.

'We will be following the leaderboard top 10 from the start of their rounds to their finish, plus the continued action from those that started before them - so audiences won't miss any of the key action as it unfolds.'

More than four million people tuned in to watch the tournament on BBC One yesterday.

When Friday's play went on later than originally planned, the BBC relegated their coverage to BBC4 - despite most of the leaders still being out on the course.

[Teddy Bear]

Jeff Powell at the Mail makes excellent observations about this asinine BBC decision.

BBC don't understand how important big events are... their final day coverage of The Open shows an ambivalence towards sport

• The BBC chose not to start their final day Open coverage until after lunch
  
• That meant viewers weren't able to watch plenty of the final rounds
  
• The Open will be moving to Sky Sports the summer after next

By Jeff Powell for the Daily Mail

The default reaction to the BBC losing yet another of the crown jewels of sports has always been one of disappointment.

Until now.

When my all-hearing, all-seeing, all-knowing Sportsmail colleague Charlie Sale reported that The Open will be moving house to Sky the summer after next, the only rational feeling was that the Beeb had it coming.

Only Auntie could conceivably have failed to adjust properly to the most royal and ancient of all golf tournaments being forced by the weather to delay its final round to Monday.

Only the BBC would have waited six hours before starting coverage of the climactic day until after lunch, thus putting such time-filling trivialities as Bargain Hunt before its duty to bring the public all the drama of the morning's play.

For that, they have taken plenty of stick already.

But that is not even the half of it.

The devil is in the detail of the conflicting excuses:

1) Our job was just to show who won.

2) We didn't have enough cameramen still available on site at St Andrew's.

Whatever the truth, it hardly matters.

Both statements expose the ambivalence of the BBC towards sport and the corporation's skewed priorities.

The first tells us that the once-finest of all sports broadcasters now has little or no understanding of how important these events are to a vast swathe of its audience.

The second confirms that the BBC puts the huge salaries of its senior staff and so-called talent before investment in sport.

By way of further proof of the latter, at a time when the Beeb's profligate waste of our money is under government scrutiny, one executive was either foolish or devious enough to offer this as evidence that a cut in the license fee would compromise its coverage of sport.

This, as golf goes the way of Test cricket, major football, the Grand National, the Derby and Royal Ascot. And the BBC loses control of its most precious jewel of all, the Olympics, from 2022 onwards.

This, as Six Nations Rugby, split between BBC and ITV from next year, considers upping sticks completely. As Wimbledon begins to wonder if it is doing the right thing by loyally taking less than half the millions for its hallowed fortnight of tennis than Sky or BT would happily pay.

Perhaps worst of all, after watching the BBC's screening of The Open when they actually were on air, who can blame any of those governing bodies for walking away?

The longer the tournament went, the lesser the outrage at the R&A for selling out.

Too often, the cameramen were incapable of following the flight of the ball through the air, or finding where it landed. Too frequent, the key moments were missed.

And when those operatives were reduced in number on Monday, there were times when it was difficult to fathom much at all of what was going on.

So sketchy were the pictures that even our crown regent of golf commentators, Peter Alliss, had to keep asking for information, saying in his polite manner: 'Perhaps someone could tell us what has happened there?'

The most measly of the answers he received came when the politically correct lefty luvvies who run the BBC took it upon themselves to issue an apology for his allegedly sexist remarks.

Never mind the historic events they are losing, they couldn't even bring themselves to defend a giant of their own for his gentle jest about how the wife of the richly-remunerated winner Zach Johnson could start planning a new kitchen.

Was that really so terrible? Did Mrs Johnson truly feel demeaned? Or are the BBC broadcasting scared?

Perhaps all the usual suspects who professed such outrage would rather he had said something as colourful as: 'The winning prize is a lot of money.'

This, at 84, was likely to be the last of Alliss' half century of marvellously erudite Opens behind the microphone. Perhaps, after this, he is not going to miss it as much as we are going to miss him.

Not that we are going to miss Auntie as much as we always thought we would.

Not while its bigwigs are in their lavish counting houses counting out our money, instead of using it to outbid Sky so as to keep such treasures as The Open and The Ashes on terrestrial television.

When it comes to BBC sport, nostalgia is no longer what it used to be.

[charmbrights]

I, too, was livid on the Monday, when coverage of the Royal Welsh Show was ditched to broadcast the speeches AFTER the Open had finished. I understand that golf matters, but once the result is decided why show the flummery and meaningless speeched instead of a major event, at least on BBC Wales?