Sometimes Mediawatch wakes up grumpy and cannot be arsed to trawl through dozens of clickbait websites to highlight endless examples of clickbait sh*thousing and erroneous uses of words like ‘rampage’. It’s frankly quite depressing work and it’s only getting more bleak as publishers try ever harder to fight the losing battle with attention spans and Google.
And then we hope that somebody in the media has been something of a prick and we can ‘watch’ them in the traditional sense of not averting our eyes while they dig themselves a massive big, prickish hole.
So our thanks today to Michael Cox of The Athletic, not for being a prick but for alerting us to the Daily Telegraph column bemoaning that the BBC have consigned ‘male presenters to history as big beasts at BBC Sport are all female’. And also for a great gag…
If only they could offer some more balance like The Telegraph (all 36 articles currently on its sport tab written by men)https://t.co/JjgcHSkonx
— Michael Cox (@Zonal_Marking) December 16, 2025
There’s nothing the Telegraph like more than getting angry about the BBC, trans women, the BBC and all the other women, and Simon Briggs steps up with his view that those bloody women are taking over.
We would like to reluctantly start with the use of the phrase ‘big beasts’. It’s really bloody weird. Previously the Telegraph have referred to various Tories and Andrew Neil as ‘big beasts’, so we’re really no wiser about what it means. It doesn’t sound flattering.
Anyway, onto the real nonsense:
After a fortnight of billycans and bellyaching in the Australian jungle, Alex Scott has just returned from I’m a Celebrity to her familiar seat on Football Focus.
Her brief absence failed to make any appreciable impact on a show which, like the Last Night of the Proms, appears to have been doing exactly the same thing for decades. But it was interesting to see the identity of her deputy for the past fortnight: Jeanette Kwakye, the former sprinter who presented the World Athletics Championships this summer.
This two-week substitution only added to the sense that there is just one route into camera-facing roles at BBC Sport in 2025, and that is to have been a female athlete like Scott, Kwakye, Isa Guha, Sam Quek or Chemmy Alcott.
As long as you ignore the BBC’s actual flagship sports programme Match of the Day on Saturday night, which was presented by Mark Chapman, and Final Score on the BBC that afternoon – presented by Jason Mohammad – then yes, you cannot move for women who presented *checks notes* one of the three football programmes on BBC on Saturday.
‘This is not to suggest that I have a problem with any of these presenters on an individual level,’ writes Briggs, who stops short of pointing out that some of his best friends are women. No, he is worried about the ‘levels of homogeneity not seen since the early 1990s’. Won’t somebody please think of the poor men…
A course correction was clearly required. But it is hard to shake the feeling that, like a duffer on a golf course, the BBC have hacked their way out of the rough on one side of the fairway, only to overshoot in the opposite direction.
Since Gary Lineker finished a 25-year stint in May, Mark Chapman is the only remaining male presenter with any stature – even if you can still find Jason Mohammad hiding out in the obscurity of Final Score and Rishi Persad popping up in a supporting role at the tennis or golf.
Just wait until he realises that Strictly Come Dancing has been presented by two women for ages. And then there’s bloody Traitors; why oh why isn’t Jason Mohammed given that gig?
The idea that Final Score is ‘obscure’ while Football Focus is mainstream is a nonsense in 2025 when linear TV is increasingly an anachronism. Really, we should be talking about BBC Sport on YouTube or TikTok rather than obsessing about which woman is presenting Football bloody Focus. And yet here we are…
Apart from Chapman, today’s big beasts are all female. When the BBC screens its Sports Personality of the Year show on Thursday, the line-up will consist of Scott alongside A-listers Gabby Logan and Clare Balding – for the second year running Spoty’s presentation team will be a man-free zone.
Oddly, there are no alternative names put forward by Briggs, just a general whine about ‘positive discrimination’, which ‘undermines the achievements of the very people it is promoting, leaving them open to charges of tokenism even when they are quality broadcasters in their own right’. Not sure how it can be ‘tokenism’ if the women have entirely taken over (‘apart from Chapman’), fella.
The entire lesson of diversity training is that groups with a range of backgrounds are more creative, successful and downright interesting than uniform ones. If you simply replace one orthodoxy – in this case, that of middle-aged white males – with its polar opposite, you are not actually fixing that issue.
Hmmm. What is its polar opposite? Young, black women? Did you go there? What is particularly amusing is that this particular line appears below an image of Chapman (middle-aged white man) alongside Gabby Logan and Kelly Cates (middle-aged white women). It doesn’t feel like the white, middle-aged folk are being pushed out.
Except Gary Lineker of course. Maybe the Telegraph are regretting their undisguised glee at his ‘downfall’ at the BBC, which has left him scrambling around to sign a £14m deal with Netflix for the World Cup. The poor sod.