Jake, F1 and the BBC conundrum

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For Jake Humphrey, life couldn’t have been much better for the past few years. His rise has been swift from lowly CBBC presenter to the accomplished F1 anchor on the BBC.

Jake married his childhood sweetheart Harriet in 2007 and Tuesday this week announced they were expecting their first child. His sports reporting/commentary career began as a match reporter for BBC radio in 2005 and also he became the face of American Football for the BBC.

He presented a daily afternoon show from the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and has co-presented 4 times the BBC’s end of year love in that is “Sports personality of the year”.

There was a lot of speculation when Sky landed F1 for 2012 that they desperately tried to persuade Jake to join Martin Brundle in their new venture. The importance of this failed coup has become especially evident when you listen to many people’s opinions on Sky’s anchor, Simon Lazenby. They feel he comes across as an F1 Jonny come lately and consider his style a little stilted and fawning toward the senior figures of the F1 world – in general lacking gravitas unlike Jake.

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Hello world!

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It’s a rather sad and poignant day to launch my blog. Yet it is a day that demonstrates the awesome power of social media. This incredible power is to communicate to the world, or certainly those connected through social media across the world, news and information within seconds of it happening.

This was evident today when one of the renown F1 journalists tweeted this morning, “so sad to wake and hear about Sid…” of course referring to the death of Professor Sid Watkins. The first tweet I saw regarding Sid’s death was around 21:00 last night. It used to be the case that we the public would only hear about breaking news quite some time following the event. So for millions of F1 fans to have known that Sid had passed on to join Ayrton before a number of people closely connected with the F1 circus – would have been impossible a mere handful of years ago.

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