How did you spend the few hours of anarchy that Britain had yesterday? I spent it looting the local shops and shouting "f*ck the pound!" Then I got arrested. You won't have seen me on the news though because a) The BBC prefer to show Wimbledon as opposed to big world news and b) I'm making it up.
What the devil am I talking about? Well, BBC director of news Helen Boaden has had to make something that sounds like an apology to viewers after BBC2 decided to cut away from coverage of Tony Blair's final turn at the despatch box to Sue Barker's preview of the afternoon's tennis at Wimbledon. Yes. A momentous historical event was cut short to show us centre court getting rained on. Brilliant work there Helen.
BBC2 viewers missed out on the closing stages of former PM Blair's final speech to the House of Commons when the channel abruptly dumped out of The Daily Politics at around 12:35pm for two trailers advertising Rome and Jekyll before handing over to Sue Barker who spent 25 minutes introducing tennis coverage that started at 1pm.
Andrew Neil, who presents The Daily Politics, is understood to have been angered at the scheduling decision. In a blog post Boaden said: "Sometimes bad mistakes happen on the worst possible day. And that's exactly what happened this afternoon. I saw it myself: I was watching coverage of the absolutely riveting final PMQs... with Tony Blair on The Daily Politics when it suddenly cut away in the middle of his valedictory statement to a couple of trails and the tennis. As a consequence, we only learned later that we had missed Mr Blair talking about his fear of the House of Commons, and a unique moment when both sides of the House gave him a standing ovation.
"A lot of you were taken aback and upset by the switch - and certainly Andrew Neil and the production team were deeply disappointed not to share this with you after the care and passion they put into the programme on such a special day. After looking into this, I can at least reassure you that this was cock up rather than conspiracy. A wrong scheduling decision was taken for which the BBC can only apologise. Believe me, no one involved would have wanted you to miss any part of this important event. Thankfully, News 24 was also covering PMQs live so we hope viewers were able to switch there." (read it all here)
Bloody hell fire. [Mof Gimmers]
There's also a BBC Parliament channel as well as BBC News 24 and internet coverage. Oh and the radio. And the radio streamed on the internet.
This obviously deeply impacts the general working public, of course, as we all gather sandwiches to sit in front of BBC2 watching politics at lunchtime.
Baz - News 24 cut away moments later too and you can hardly see a thing on BBC Parliament. Sky News must have been happy.
I know what you mean though - still I think this is more about the decision making of the BBC - I mean who on earth thought that a boring Sue Barker introducing the forthcoming rain for 25 minutes was more important than the bowing out of the PM?
They really fucking hate Blair don't they? I wonder why...