Those hurdles vary in size from the ones Colin Jackson glides over to a structure something on the scale Aintree's Bechers Brook. Our first obstacle is the scale of advertising space. A TV Commercial break is the time when the nation puts the kettle on, visits the bathroom or puts the wife out for the night. In some cases, as the quality and production standards of television commercials can be better than the programmes they intersperse, this can be an opportunity to actually look up from the newspaper and view these mini-dramas which so brighten our viewing. Advertisements in a rugby programme are natural breaks between editorial and an opportunity for sponsors, who put so much into rugby, to demonstrate to the spectator what services or products they supply.
Some publishers take a slightly different view.
Extreme, perhaps, but as our American friends would say, advertisers need their space. Advertisers and their agents have an unambiguous agenda. They need the best possible position in any programme in which they advertise. The agents' mantra of 'early, right hand, opposite Jonah Lomu's picture' was chanted more than once during the Rugby World Cup '99. Sufficient advertising having been acquired we can now launch ourselves at the next hurdle - the editorial.