You have to feel some pity for the Australian morning daily papers. All this World Cup excitement, including a game last night won by Australia, but the lead times to get their newspaper onto peoples front lawns by breakfast time means they can’t report the results. They try and make up for it, but there’s only so many World Cup colour supplements one can handle.

Personally I’m nowhere near fanatical enough to tune in that late at night (knowing what havoc it would have the following day through lack of sleep). But there are those that do. One guy at work did the ultimate and flew to Germany for the month, without even having to book a ticket to see a game. That’s dedication.

There’s been talk recently of moving the AFL Grand Final from its Saturday afternoon slot to an evening one, apparently for the benefits of TV. My question is: what could they gain? It’s already a sell-out at the ground, and consistently the highest rating single TV programme of the year. I find it hard to believe they’d gain any more viewers or advertising dollars.

Meanwhile the ABC has finally announced the new series of Doctor Who will air in July, starting with the Christmas episode. Yep, “Christmas in July”. I wonder how long it took the promotional people to come up with that one, and more importantly, did they hold off on showing it specifically to gain that piss-weak tagline?

They don’t seem to have learnt yet that big audiences might be gained by jumping on the bandwagon of worldwide near-simultaneous broadcasts, and harnessing existing publicity. In the global village, I want to watch what my neighbours are watching.

Did they really delay broadcasting Doctor Who (a show which is mainstream enough to be the subject of many downloads on what’s becoming known as Channel BT, and regularly gets mentions in popular newspapers such as MX) just so they could show Rocket Man in that timeslot first? All respect to Robson Green and the rest of the cast, but a cute premise, a setting in yet another UK village full of eccentrics, and an Elton John song for the theme tune don’t make a hit.