Sports coverage: where it's going wrong:

I speak of an insidious development that has crept up on us in recent years. The first time I remember this "innovation" was in the Athletics world championships which were held in Manchester a few years ago. At the beginning, and at the end, of each and every slow-motion replay the logo MANCHESTER was spread across the screen. After a few days the viewer would have seen the name writ across their screen a thousand times or more.

This June we were presented with a similar spectacle during the Euro 2012 football, when that coloured logo of the coloured blooms, growing out of a ball, of Poland and Ukraine flashed up at each end of every replay. Next we saw the tennis succumbing to a similar temptation as the logo of the All-England club filled the screen briefly before and after each replay (of which there were of course myriad)

Now I am watching the Open from Lytham, and here too the same practice has been installed, with the claret jug appearing almost every other second, not just book-ending the replays but between cuts of every kind. What's the chance of seeing "London 2012" adorning our screens a million times over the nest couple of weeks? A stone-cold certainty I would have said.

Doubtless this phenomenon has been inherited from America, the home of advertising and self-promotion, but here? Aren't we a bit more civilised than that? I fear the answer is no. Yet no one, to my knowledge at least, has ever asked the viewer whether he or she wants to be subjected to this form of (not so) subliminal product placement thousands and thousands of times. So here's the news: I don't, and I suspect I'm not alone. IT'S MADDENING AND I WANT IT TO GO AWAY! Is anyone listening out there? STOP IT!