In a League of their own

The Rugby League World Cup kicks off in Australia today, although you'd never know it from the lack of interest shown in the event by the mainstream media. The BBC has come under fire after it didn't even bother to bid for the rights to broadcast the matches live, which have now ended up with Irish subscription channel Premier Sports (political pressure from the minister responsible for media and sport, Lisa Nandy, who is also the MP for Wigan, led to a last minute deal whereby the BBC will put highlights on their iPlayer, where no one who isn't already a fan of the game will see them).

The BBC probably thinks that rugby league is a Northern sport that no one outside the M62 corridor is really interested in, but even if that's true it's no reason not to broadcast matches. With the possible exception of football, all sports are minority interests, including ones that the BBC spends a lot of time and money covering like rugby union and tennis. You can't help thinking that there is some class bias at work here, with BBC executives allocating resources to sports that they themselves follow.

Between 1999 and 2023, the BBC broadcast a weekly, hour long highlights show of Super League matches. That was then replaced by a three year deal to broadcast fifteen matches a season live, a contract which has now expired and is apparently not going to be renewed (as with the World Cup, a highlights package will be put on the iPlayer instead). That leaves them with live coverage of the Challenge Cup and England autumn international Test matches which are played outside World Cup years. If they are cut too, you might well see a sudden drop in TV licence renewals across a swathe of Northern England.

Gone for a Burton

Carlsberg announced yesterday that it will shut Marston's Brewery in Burton on Trent, where it produces cask beers including the flagship bitter Pedigree and Draught Bass, which it contract brews for AB InBev, next summer. Where those beers will now end up being brewed is anyone's guess.

I drank quite a bit of Pedigree, and the occasional pint of Draught Bass, when I was a student in Stoke on Trent in the early nineties, the former mostly in the Victoria pub, opposite Stoke City's ground of the same name, after meetings in the Labour Party offices round the corner. In the 2010s, I regularly drank Draught Bass at the Unicorn in Manchester city centre, the pub where the Honourable Order of Bass Drinkers was founded in the late sixties, when Manchester Jazz Society met there, and in 2013 went to Burton on Trent where the Coopers Tavern serves it straight from the cask. 

AB InBev belatedly started an advertising drive last year to promote Draught Bass, which has since seen a modest uptick in sales, including amongst young people, paralleling the much wider popularity of Draught Guinness with that age group. Let's hope that they can find another brewery with the capacity to produce enough of it to meet the continuing and deserved demand for this iconic beer.