The Opening Ceremony of the Commonwealth Games wasn’t too bad, despite my snarky comment last night. Obviously it wasn’t the 2012 Opening Ceremony. We’re 14 years later, many of those under Tory austerity and Covid, and the Commonwealth Games are always going to be on a smaller scale than the Olympics anyway.

After the surprising use of the BBC’s Doctor Who (including a brief moment of Sylvester McCoy in costume and character), despite it being on Channel 5, it got a bit royal for my taste, but fair enough, I guess.

The parade of the athletes came first, which is unusual, but makes sense to me. But Channel 5: oh my god, the adverts! Seemed like every five minutes they went to another ad break. And long beaks, with five or six adverts in each. And it’s not like the action had stopped: the parade was still going on. If you were waiting to see a particular country, there was a good chance you’d miss it. And coming back, the commentators were often in the middle of a sentence, so it’s not like they were aware of the breaks.

After the parade there was music and dance, a celebration of Glasgow, and far fewer ads. So yeah, it was all good. But if we want to watch any of the actual sport, the only option seems to be a daily highlights show on Channel 5. The live stuff is on something called TNT Sport, which I don’t even know where you’d see it. Satellite? Cable? Is this the nineties? I mean I guess it might have a streaming option, but I’m not going to sign up for that for ten days of sport.

It’s also on HBO Max, which I thought was only in America. Maybe we can get it here now? In which case the signing-up point still applies, but at least there might be some more shows on it.

Oh well, first-world problems, I guess.