The nightmare is nearing an end. ITV's don't-give-a-damn-about-the-viewers reign as the sole provider of Formula One Grand Prix TV coverage to the UK will be over at the end of this season. And not a day too soon.
The commentary and the coverage itself was fine. But ITV showed its utter contempt for viewers by running ad breaks during the live races - a policy that robbed viewers of four hours, six minutes and four seconds of live race action.
That's the equivalent of more than two-and-a-half entire races.
Imagine if ITV had dared to show ads during live football matches - not at half-time, but during the matches themselves. There would have been uproar. But because it was F1, ITV just carried on regardless, more interested in how much it could charge advertisers for airtime than the fact that the ads would ruin the enjoyment of the very programme viewers had tuned in to see.
Shocked by ITV's indifference to its viewers, and by Ofcom's decision to turn a blind eye to ITV's flouting of its own regulations, this blog launched the ITV F1 Ads Campaign and the Formula One Roll of Shame, updated after every race to show which advertisers had decided to buy airtime knowing that it would ruin viewers' enjoyment of the race.
Thanks to this morning's revelation, that campaign is now redundant.
The BBC will be resuming coverage of F1 from next season for at least five years, which will mean uninterrupted overage of every race, as well as live coverage on the web as well.
It feels almost as if a hostile force has agreed to leave and the occupation of the sport we enjoy will be over.
Despite having worked for the BBC for a few months last year - after I launched the campaign, and quite unexpectedly - I've never had anything against ITV or the commercial necessity that it had to sell ads during its F1 programmes.
But it did not need to sell them during the live race itself - and Ofcom should not have allowed it to.
There is media speculation that ITV wasn't attracting enough viewers for its F1 coverage, which is why it decided to give up the contract a year early.
I have no way of telling if that's the case. But if it were true, could the lack of viewers be due to the fact that fans who tuned in to ITV's coverage gave up in disgust - and in their droves - when ITV plonked five ad breaks right in the middle of the races, denying them almost a quarter of an hour of coverage in a sport in which even hundredths of a second make all the difference?
Poetic justice, perhaps.
Sitting here with a stopwatch to time the ad breaks in every single race of last season, sometimes in the very early hours, was hardly fun. But it did expose the magnitude of ITV's contempt for us by compiling, for the first time, statistics detailing the precise amount of race time ITV robbed us of.
As a reminder, here's a race-by-race breakdown of how much we missed of each race last season:
RACE TIME MISSED
Australia 06 mins 56 secs
Malaysia 14 mins 31 secs
Bahrain 14 mins 22 secs
Spain 14 mins 24 secs
Monaco 14 mins 15 secs
Canada 17 mins 15 secs
USA 14 mins 20 secs
France 14 mins 29 secs
Britain 14 mins 29 secs
European 14 mins 20 secs
Hungary 14 mins 20 secs
Turkey 14 mins 23 secs
Italy 14 mins 28 secs
Belgium 14 mins 27 secs
Japan 11 mins 20 secs
China 14 mins 21 secs
Brazil 14 mins 24 secs
TOTAL TIME LOST LAST SEASON: 4 hours 06 mins 04 secs!
One man who should take the credit for rescuing Formula One for the fans is Roger Mosey (pictured below), the BBC's Director of Sport. His shrewd negotiations snatched the sport away from ITV and saved it for the nation, without adding a penny to the licence fee.
I doubt if anyone will erect a statue to him, but Roger Mosey has made an even bigger contribution to UK fans' enjoyment of Formula One than Lewis Hamilton did in his astonishing debut.
And I hope we all remember Roger's contribution when the BBC takes over and we get to see Lewis Hamilton racing rather than an ad for Ronseal, or those little ad-break bumpers that tell us that Honda or Sony have sponsored the programme without mentioning that they're simultaneously spoiling it.
Bless you, Roger.
Jon McKnight
Author of Sort The Bastards!
