On why I heart Martin Brundle.

Today, you were mentioned on live international TV. Today, you influenced live international  TV. Today, Martin Brundle* made a special effort to say ‘petROV’ rather than ‘PETrov’** until the race got too exciting, which was about as long as it took the man himself to pile ignominiously into the back of Michael Schumacher***.

You have been laying siege on this issue via Twitter to the BBC F1 team for *cough* some months now.

This is because you are cross at the BBC.

To recap, those paying attention to this blog may know that back in January, the BBC announced it was to cut loose your favourite online community.

This is not why you are cross. They could have shut the place down cold, but they didn’t, which gave you a chance to save it. And you**** did.

No, you are cross because in the ten years they had it, they ran it into the ground. Nearly into the ground. And this week it has become clear that the code has been held together with chewing gum and rubber bands for quite some time*****. Heroic efforts by the volunteer (but expert) tech team has got it up and running and plans are afoot to drag the site kicking and screaming into 2006*****. And then? Then it will get really interesting. But still. It should never have got to this point. In your opinion.

Anyway.

This meant that when the BBC announced that the same spending cuts which had axed your hangout meant that it would be sharing coverage of Formula One races with Sky, you were in two minds.

On the one hand, schadenfreude ruled .

On the other hand, AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Pay per view for 50% of the races? And even more importantly, what will be happening with the superlatively splendid line up of people covering the races they have this year?

To be honest, you had been rather hoping that making David Coulthard into a race commentator represented a radical cost cutting measure. Previously, Martin Brundle, who has been on the commentary team for over ten years was ex driver expert, there to lend colour to whoever was calling the minutiae of the action.  For the last couple of years, David Coulthard, a much more recently ex driver, has been one of three pundits, including Eddie Jordan******, former team owner, flown around the world to talk at the beginning and of the race. This way, the BBC at least made a net saving of one person’s wages and travel expenses, and they were getting DC and Martin******* to work harder for their money.

Sadly it appears not. And as you cannot feel but that, given a choice between working on only half the races********* and working on all the races, the cream of the crop will disappear of to Sky.

And this lot are the cream. Jake Humphrey is the host and the straight man, the Formula One layman for all the others to bounce off. Coulthard and Eddie Jordan provide the opinions, as well as extensive contacts in the business and a soupcon of bickering. This is always entertaining.

But Martin******* and DC together for the race has been inspired.

Now, you haven’t really cottoned to the last two lead commentators. James Allen tended to get a bit obsessed by the British drivers and Jonothan Legard seemed often to be doing the F1 for dummies version, although you could well believe that was the policy of the BBC rather than his own preference. You darkly suspect the person producing the programme was not a fan of motorsport and insisted that this was the level of information people would understand.

Given that races of late have been 55-75 laps of processional driving, punctuated by brief flurries of activity as everybody pitted, this got old very quickly. I mean, there really was a limit to how many times you needed the action recapped.

So the prospect of having two former drivers to call the race made you rub your hands together. You fondly imagined that you would have a soothing one and a half hours of knowledgeable and leisurely chat and reminiscing from two experts in their field, vaguely related to what was happening on the screen behind them.

Of course, the first  of time the cars set tyre on track this season put paid to that. You’ve mentioned this before**********, but various mucking about with the rules has produced some breathtakingly energetic racing. Which clearly took everybody them in the commentary box by surprise as well.

For the first few rounds. But while it was fun to listen to the frenziedly incredulous enjoyment that resulted, it’s been even more fun to hear the commentary since Martin and Coulthard have really found their feet. You still get the ‘squeeee!’ factor; you get the eagle-eyes spotting things as it flashes past them at speed that someone who hasn’t done it for a living would have to spend twenty minutes and extensive use of the pause button trying to see; and now you also get a decent idea of who is where, who’s gone out, who is about to overtake and who is having a complete shocker.

And you do get the leisurely, well-informed chat too. As long as you press the red button after the race has finished.

So, when the cuts were announced, you signed up to the ‘keep F1 on the BBC‘ campaign. Mainly, you have to confess, to needle the Beeb in your own small, insignificant way. You don’t expect the Beeb will listen. You don’t expect they can, having spent the F1 budget for the next twenty years on tantalising you with the prospect of F1 commentary Nirvana this year, thus virtually ensuring that you will have it, and half the races taken straight away. But you would like them to know how monumentally pissed off you are about it.

Now this campaign involves trying to get the twitter hash tag #keepf1onbbc to trend on race weekends.

But you don’t tweet about Formula One as a rule. So while you were contemplating this tricky issue, you heard Martin say ‘… PETrov…’ and an idea was born*************.

Because people on the telly are always getting the stress wrong in Russian names and this really scrapes fingernails across your soul. This particularly scrapes fingernails across your soul when it happens on the BBC, as you heard from somewhere that the Beeb employs a whole department to work out how to pronounce those pesky forn names and tell their on screen staff************.

So you started tweeting about this to @MBrundleF1 and anyone else who might be listening.

After a while you turned it into a virtual drinking game. Any mention by the F1 team where they mispronounced petROV’s name got a tweet.

You had a lot of fun.

But you had rather given up the hope, the very faint hope, of anybody actually taking any notice of this when suddenly, today, Martin spotted petROV’s car as he was doing his grid walk to pounce on lounging drivers, busy engineers, posing celebrities, and passing heads of state, paused, struggled briefly with the pronunciation, and conceded your point.

You are ’someone having a bit of a moan on Twitter’, and you are so, so proud.

Sadly, the rest of the BBC has not caught on to this yet. You will clearly have to redouble your attack next Grand Prix.

Here’s the BBC iPlayer (available for one week only, to those in the UK).

Your bit starts at 41 minutes 59ish seconds. It lasts until (optimistically) 42 mins 15ish seconds. Hang about for a bit, though, and you’ll hear him forcing the stress into the right place any number of times up until petROV’s accident. Which starts at 1 hour 32 mins or thereabouts. Enjoy!************

This is petROV! Not PETrov! Image via Wikipedia

*Martin Brundle is the lead commentator on the BBC’s Formula One coverage of the sport, for the Formula One challenged among us.

**The first Russian Formula One driver. Since you have been paying attention, which would have been 1996 or so, in case anyone is feeling pedantic.

***Do you need to explain who Michael Schumacher is? Surely not.

****You use the word ‘you’ somewhat loosely here. But as you type you are clinking virtual champagne classes in the go/no go meeting which has just relaunched the site.

*****You have shamelessly stolen these lines from some of your fellow researchers.

*****It’s tempting to add ‘the flamboyant’, but that’s really just his shirts.

******You feel confident that you and Marty are now on familiar terms.

*******If anyone is interested, the deal is that Sky will broadcast all the races as part of one of its pay per view packages. The Beeb will get half the races (including Silverstone********! So that’s OK!) and the others will have ‘extended highlight shows. Broadcast after the fact.

********The British Grand Prix. Do try to keep up.

*********Does anyone actually read the motorsport posts?

**********It helped that Martin was himself ribbing DC about his inability to pronounce VETtel correctly.

***********Of course, it’s entirely possible this department has gone the way of the budget downsizing, if it ever existed. In which case, please take the rest of this post as being you doing your bit for the Big Society.

************Oh, by the way, Red Bull won the Constructor’s Championship this week. Vettel won the race, and the Driver’s Championship last week. They’ve been having an good year. This pales into significance, of course, in comparison the the much more important news of the patchily correct pronunciation of petROV’s name. But still. Well done, Red Bull and Vettel.

On great Formula One battles.

So yesterday was the Malaysian Grand Prix*.

It was quite exciting, or at least an awful lot seemed to happen.

This is quite unusual in Formula One, which can descend into knowing almost precisely who will win within the first ten laps.

Of course, the person who was leading in the first ten laps was, in fact, the person who won in this race too**. But there was a bit of a scrum behind him and that was the important thing.

Now people might think that the point of Formula One is that it is a battle for excellence amongst drivers, or race strategists, or, at least, between engineers. However, you are fast coming to the conclusion that actually, the real battle is between the design teams and the governing body of the sport.

This is because every year, the FIA fiddles with the racing rules to try to slow the cars down, cripple them aerodynamically, make sure they have to stop occasionally, limit the clever design solutions which the teams can come up with to counter these measures and insist on certain other devices being introduced all with the aim of allowing one driver to actually pass another, should his skill be sufficient.

This has proved quite hard. It is in the nature of the engineering race to try to make the car too fast, too aerodynamically efficient, able to run for longer, to invent ways round the perimeters that the FIA hasn’t conceived of yet and to find ways to defend against any useful bit of kit the other teams might have come up with, and the technical gurus are very very good at this.

The FIA seems to have a nose ahead this season, though.

There are two gadgets designed to give the cars a boost at the right time in the right place. Something called DRS, which can change the aerodynamics of the car at a strategic moment, and the KERS, which gives more power. Although part of the success of these is that there seems to be a splendid fail rate in the race at the moment, which in itself creates more opportunities.

But the thing that really put the cat among the pigeons on Sunday was the way the tyre manufacturer, who is the same for all the cars, has been asked to provide tyres which are designed to fall to pieces as quickly as possible. This means more stops so that new sets can be fitted, which opens up windows for different drivers with different strategies gaining or losing an advantage anyway. And because quite when and how the tyres will start to degrade isn’t well understood yet, getting the timing right on these stops hasn’t been perfected and at least for now is providing all sorts of opportunities for errors, confusion and downright incompetence.

It was a lot of fun.

You felt a bit for the commentators though.

Particularly since it is only their second outing as a commentating team.

Yes, Vettel is only twelve years old. Or, aren't you getting old?

*Formula One, for the motorsport challenged amongst us.

** Sebastian Vettel. Of course. He drives for Red Bull. May well be unstoppable this season. He also won the Championship last year.

On Masha i Medved

You most favourite Russian cartoon is a modern one called Masha i Medved, or Masha and the Bear.

Masha and the Bear is a traditional fairy story about a little girl who gets lost in the woods and is eventually restored to her loving grandparents by a friendly bear.

This isn’t that story. Not quite.

But it does cover (rural) Russian culture quite nicely. Fishing, jam making, ice skating, celebrating New Year, wolves, the obsession with the works of O. Henry, samovars, gardening, football, that sort of thing.

You presume they are saving the topics of mushroom picking and having a shashlik for later.

However, that’s not the reason why it is your favourite Russian cartoon. It’s your favourite Russian cartoon because whoever is making it is clearly channelling the Star. Masha, quite frankly, is the Star, albeit in a pink headscarf.

Here is a sample. It helps to know that another famous fairy story includes a fisherman catching a golden fish and being granted three wishes in exchange for chucking it back again.

Warning: anyone expressing the slightest interest is in danger of having a DVD, complete with homemade translation, thrust upon them. You would quite like the cartoon makers to keep getting paid so they can make more episodes. Your Christmas presents had a  certain… sameness… to them this year.

On Nu Pogodi!

Nu Pogodi! (Just you wait!) is your second favourite Russian cartoon. Which is disappointing, as there are some truly great sensitive and artistically worthy Soviet cartoons out there. And this isn’t one of them.

The series was made in the 1970s and 80s and is the story of a wolf trying to catch a hare.

The wolf is a very disreputable sort. He slouches around, doing no work, thumbing his nose at authority figures (behind their backs), smoking, drinking and wearing really quite hippified clothes. And worse! He is scruffy!

Russians don’t really do scruffy.

The hare is much more like it. Bright eyed, cheerful, joins in with cultural activities, waters his flowers, wears very neat little outfits. That sort of thing.

He really doesn’t have the same cachet as the wolf.

The wolf is clearly the real hero of the cartoons. And yet he is the very epitome of what good Soviet people were supposed to revile. You’d have banned it like a shot. Which just goes to show how much you still don’t understand about Soviet Russia.

Of course, it’s still wildly popular today.

You like it because it shows all sorts of scenes from contemporary mainly urban life. The museum, the fairground, the stadium, at a concert, at New Year, at the Olympics and so on. You find it quite fascinating. The music is pretty evocative too.

And because they are a welcome relief after the terminally sanitised shows on kid’s TV these days.

You recommend episodes 1 -16. After that, they are the modern versions and even the Russians balk at having their children’s icons smoke.

On Dad’s Army, the Musical.

So you recently went to see a musical version of Dad’s Army put on by an amateur company you are friendly with.

Dad’s Army, for the Britanically challenged amongst us, was originally a long running TV series about a particularly incompetent chapter of the Home Guard, men who weren’t actually in the armed forces during World War Two on the grounds of being old, infirm or bank managers but who were armed to the teeth with pitchforks and expected to help defend the white cliffs in the event of an invasion. It was a comedy. Much bantering in the village hall in drafty uniforms with pauses for tea.

So is the musical stage version. Apparently it’s a splicing together of a few of the TV episodes. With added wartime songs and a singalong at the end.

It was fun. Much of the amusement value was watching the actors doing impressions of their more famous counterparts. Very successfully too. It was well cast. Plus you enjoyed the songs. You are just* old enough to have been around when they were still well-known songs. and young enough** that they have sunk without trace for many many years now.

And of course, you got to boo some Germans, which made it practically panto already and a good way of getting into the Christmas spirit.

Anyway. The men (and, in the musical, the women) of Dad’s Army bumble along, but they are decent people, trying to do the decent thing in difficult times. It was sweet and nostalgic and everybody belted out Rule Britannia at the end with a real feeling of warm and fuzzy pride. Except B. Who waved his red paper napkin and sang  Sovietksi Soyuz.

But how difficult? You see because B was there, you suddenly found yourself wondering how gently entertaining a Russian, sorry, Soviet, version would be. Cheerful ditties about eating Granny to stave off starvation in the blockade of Leningrad? Plucky witicisims about Mrs Ivanov having her house set fire to by the invading army, with  her and her baby inside of it? Tap dance routines from the cheeky young pioneer leaping across the bodies of his family and friends during the carnage in Stalingrad?

Of course, Dad’s Army doesn’t represent the full gamut of British experiences of World War Two. There are plenty of harrowing tales there and some of them even happened to civilians.

But the comfortableness of the evening worried you a bit.

Although it wasn’t half as bad as the last time you went to that particular venue to see that particular company perform.

That time the entertainment was Jack the Ripper, the Musical.

*Just. Just.

**Easily. Easily.

On niggle wiggle woo.

You blame yourself. Before you noticed how it had happened, it had become your habit to sit through an episode of In the Night Garden… with the Star before you go upstairs and watch him transfer all of the water in his bath onto the floor.

He’s entranced. Slack jawed even.

He is also showing signs of learning the word ‘pinkyponk’ and ‘ninkynonk’. Since he only has a vocabulary of about ten items, this is somewhat disturbing.

Although more upsetting for you is the way the Garden’s public transport vehicles randomly change size.

Personally, you like Makka Pakka. He’s obsessed by cleaning things and he really likes collecting stones.

Of course, you find yourself worrying that he doesn’t have many friends.

But the Star has clearly bonded with Iggle Piggle.

Every time he has come across a new toddler lately, he has tried to fling his arms around them and kiss them. Just like Iggle Piggle does every time he meets Upsy Daisy.

Unfortunately, the other children do not seem to be such devoted fans of the programme as the Star is. They tend to fall over. Or shove him away. Or start crying. Or all three.

This is probably a good thing.

It might deter him from leaping off the roof in a spiderman costume when the time comes.

On normal service.

Unfortunately, you will not be writing a blog entry tonight.

Die Hard 4.0 is on the TV.

On the idiotbox.

Best Friend recently commented that it was time for Mutual Acquaintance to go back to work. She was starting to contemplate which of the CBeebies presenters she fancied.

It hasn’t yet come to that,* but you have started heckling the TV.

You originally only tuned in because the education geek inside you was curious about the way the world was being presented to pre-schoolers and the methods they were using to get their point across.

But the programme makers must be doing something right as the Star, hitherto completely uninterested in the big screen flickering harmlessly on the wall, was hooked from the very beginning of the very first programme.

This is a mixed blessing. You are now able to do the post breakfast washing up and other acts of housework without fear of molestation. But you are also forced to listen to an awful lot of very energetic people warbling enthusiastically away at what you persist in thinking is an ungodly hour for cheerfulness.

There are some shows you like. In the Night Garden is a surprise hit with you.

When Friend of the Family gave the Star a cuddly Iggle Piggle in his first few months you were forced to get rid of it as it gave your nightmares.

In fact, it has all the surrealism that modern fairy tales lack. Whole episodes are given over to the Tombliboos losing their trousers and needing to find them again, taking their trousers off and needing to put them back on again, getting the wrong trousers on and needing to swap them back again, and remembering to take their trousers off at bedtime. This is about as age appropriate as it gets.

If it weren’t for the slightly too knowing voiceover, very reminiscent of Little Britain and surely a nod to the other core audience of layabout students, you would be completely delighted with it.

However, many of the programmes just annoy you.

You thought at first you might like Squiglet and his magic ability to make his drawings come to life. You thoroughly approve of the way he breaks down his sketches into really short simple steps that small children can follow. And he certainly has a less irritating theme tune than the other resident CBeebies artist, Louie.

But he insists on calling his tools by whimsical names and you can’t help yourself.

‘Get your squiggle sticks!’ he says.

‘… crayons…’ Mummy mutters.

‘And your squiggle pads!’

‘… sketch pads.’

‘Let’s get squiggling!’

‘Oh for goodness sake, isn’t DRAWING interesting enough when you are two?’

And then there’s Big Cook Little Cook.

They are the worst offenders in the lets-make-fairy-tales-fluffy stakes, of course, which automatically earns them a black mark. 

Mostly, though, it’s the moment where, every day, they are walking around looking puzzled because they can’t think of what to cook for the story book character who has wandered into their cafe in search of something to eat.

You find yourself with the uncontrollable urge to shout ‘OH. MY. GOD. WHY DO YOU GO THOUGH THIS PANTOMIME EVERY DAY? HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY NOT REMEMBER? GET OUT BIG COOK’S BIG COOKERY BOOK! YOU ALWAYS DO! GO STRAIGHT FOR  THE BOOK! STOP WASTING TIME! GET THE BOOK! GET IT NOW!’

Yes, you are aware the repetition is why the little ones like it. No, it doesn’t seem to help.

You also can’t abide the positively sanctimonious way they go about the clearing up. Bet they put the dishwasher on as soon as the cameras are off you think sourly while sullenly scouring the porridge pan, whose contents every day seem cemented on.

And as for their tag line – ‘We’ll cook for everyone!’ – well, let’s just say you take great pleasure in choosing a new person every day who the BBC probably wouldn’t allow in the cafe, starting with Hitler and getting increasingly tasteless from there.

However, the programme you really can’t abide is Balamory. Which is unfortunate because at the moment it is plum in the middle of your scheduled baby opium** session.

One of your issues with the UK is that Brits are seemingly incapable of interacting in society without iron clad rules, nay, laws even, to govern polite behaviour, but at some point sticking to the rules has become more important than adhering to the intent behind them.

Balamory illustrates this tendency perfectly. 

You feel sure that somewhere in the regulations for children’s TV programmes there is a guideline for the proportion of ethnic minorities to be included in every given show. So despite the fact that Balamory is set on some remote Scottish island there are two main characters out of a very limited cast who are black. Yeah right, you tend to think at this point, what a happy multicultural society we are. Every Scottish island has 40% of its population who are non-white.

You would be more tolerant of this whitewashing of reality if the programme makers hadn’t clearly decided they had now met their right on targets for that week and promptly pissed of for lunch.

As a result, there’s a teacher, a couple of small business owners, and a police officer in Balamory*** but the black people get to play the fitness enthusiast and the painter and decorator. The physical and uneducated roles, ye ken?

It’s surprising really that the resident plumber isn’t Polish and the local corner shop run by someone from the Indian subcontinent, with attendant comedy accents.

But instead, how could we possibly we guess, the local grocer is a wheelchair bound woman, although in a rare moment of sanity, she does have her Mum to do the heavy lifting. But where, you would like to know, is the same sex couple who run the hairdressers? If we are actually being broadminded.

And if anyone thinks you are being overly critical, consider that the most intelligent person on the programme – the eccentric inventor – is, of course, male, white and, just to ensure that the status quo is not really challenged in any way, English. Upper class English, to boot.

However, you could weather the sloppy liberal thinking if it weren’t for the storylines. Which are moral pap, and worse, moral pap you don’t agree with.

A week or so ago they were teaching your child that if guests arrive unexpectedly, it is ok to sit there and prepare to eat a large piece of chocolate cake in front of them without offering them so much as a glass of water. That it is polite, as a guest, to demand that the hostess make a present of something she clearly doesn’t want to and, even worse, to blatantly lie.

Because if that cake was homemade, then you are Delia Smith.

Then there was the time that the community insisted that someone who clearly wasn’t capable of it should organise the village disco, passing over more obvious candidates because if they want it, they should be entitled to have it. Preferably yesterday. And to hell with all that nonsense about needing some talent or, heaven forbid, hard work to become successful****.

But most offensive was the day they spent insisting that one of the characters wasn’t allowed to grieve for the death of a pet.

It’s enough to make you fire up the the Russian satellite.

Unfortunately, the time difference means that the only place showing children’s programmes at that time is the American sponsored fundamentalist Christian brainwashing channel.

You are this close to being forced to fall back on books.

 *But since the topic has been brought up then… Mister Maker. It’s the waistcoat.

**Or ‘babypium’ as Starbucks would doubtles call it.

***And surprise surprise but the police officer is a man and the teacher is a woman. Whodathunkit?

****Or perhaps because the most obvious candidate was black. Uppity…

On oochie coo.

It was while you were watching some soppy reality TV zoo documentary programmy whatsit about a month after the Star was born that you finally realised that something was very very wrong.

There were lions. There were penguins. There were lizards. There were elephants. There were meercats. There were polar bears. There were ostriches. There were rhinos. There were baby rhinos.

There were baby rhinos!

There were BABY RHINOS!!

There were BABY RHINOS!!!

Look at the CUTE BABY RHINOS!!!!

The baby rhinos exited the screen stage right and you shook yourself and went and made a cup of tea in order to calm down.

After all baby rhinos really are quite sweet. Responses like that are perfectly natural. Perfectly natural. Everybody lactates at the sight of baby rhinos, don’t they?

But when you came back, there were some scrawny newly hatched pelicans flopping around on screen, looking positively revolting.

And something inside you still said: Baby birds. Baby birds! BABY BIRDS!! BABY BIRDS!!! Look at the CUTE BABY BIRDS!!!!

At which point you decided you can take this bonding business too far and have been avoiding kittens, Monsters Inc, anything fluffy and pink, and ‘baby in peril’ stories ever since.

Particularly ‘baby in peril’ stories. You had actual screaming nightmares after Weekend Breakfast played you an emergency phone call which included a baby’s dying whimpers in the background. As part of a piece on why there had been so many complaints about it when they played it as part of the regular news.*

So you are not watching Children in Need tonight. What with one thing and another, you’d probably bet the house.

 

*The BBC’s representative said “Well, it would have been different if it had been a video phone of course, but just the sound doesn’t have the same impact.”

On inflation.

Being a Formula One fan in Russia was not easy.

They never seemed to conclude negotiations for the TV rights before the third race, which meant that not only did you miss the beginning of the season, but you had to surf the channels every Sunday from March until you found out who was showing it this year.

The commentator phoned his part in. Literally. And frequently got cut off.

And on one memorable occasion, the end of an exciting race, full of rain and incident, was cut off before the equally climatic end because it had overrun the time allotted to it.

So imagine your delight at being back in the country of full qualifying coverage and hour long F1 magazine shows on both the Saturday and Sunday of a race, with presenters who were on a first name basis with practically everybody in the business and spoke a language where you actually understood the word ‘overtake’. On the rare occasions they were forced to use it.

The advent of Lewis Hamilton has not been an unmixed blessing in terms of the amount of coverage the sport gets.

Yes, suddenly there is no reason to wince and listen out for the fateful words ‘… and the entire population has been hospitalised after the worst case of dancing round your handbags in white stilettos whilst completely shitfaced the country has seen in fifty years…’ every time your home town is mentioned on TV.

Although you suspect that the reason why presenters cannot say ‘Lewis Hamilton’  without adding ‘from S________’ is through sheer amazement than anyone from there has even come close to winning anything. Ever.

But on the other hand, prior to last year if the results of a race made it to the news, they would appear nicely tucked away behind Football’s Conference League scores rather than as a headline before the latest stock market crash, giving you plenty of time to switch over when you are planning to watch the Singapore rerun later in the day.

They would also not be embellished upon, therefore ruining what little reason you still had to slog through three hours of now entirely distensionified racing.

More importantly, the interest in Formula One would not have risen to the point where ITV has been priced out of the market, something you only discovered today, and which was such a horrifying prospect that you almost …almost… failed to notice who won the Driver’s Championship this year because you were distractedly reviewing your finances to decide if you could afford Sky.

Did you mention Lewis Hamilton comes from S________?