New channel and a new name but the formula stays the same

Hello, good evening and welcome to Match of the Day with adverts. The Premiership, ITV's new Saturday evening flagship, sailed a familiar course, which will be followed, it seems, until such time as there is a radical re-think about the nature of football highlights programmes. Apart from three or four modest innovations, of which some worked and some fell flat, the mix was much the same: three main matches interspersed with short interview clips and equally brief comment from old pros in the studio.

Hello, good evening and welcome to Match of the Day with adverts. The Premiership, ITV's new Saturday evening flagship, sailed a familiar course, which will be followed, it seems, until such time as there is a radical re-think about the nature of football highlights programmes. Apart from three or four modest innovations, of which some worked and some fell flat, the mix was much the same: three main matches interspersed with short interview clips and equally brief comment from old pros in the studio.

As usual, fans, referees, club officials or journalists had no part to play, even on a programme supposedly appealing to a wider family audience. ITV's selling point was essentially timing, the 7pm kick-off – with a slightly longer version after closing-time at 11.45pm – offering the one major change to what we have grown used to over the past 35 years.

Des Lynam, though his under-stated charm is less well suited to the hard-sell of commercial television, made the relevant point immediately. (Looks theatrically at his watch): ''Better for you, better for all of us''. Unless you are on the way home from a match. ''It's the nation's No 1 sport,'' Des helpfully informed us, in case any BBC toffs had tuned in imagining that the Premiership in question was the rugby union one.

The other inevitable feature of ITV programmes is, of course, the advertising break, the first of which occurred jarringly early and seemed to go on for ever (four full minutes of cars, chocolate, computers, cider, films and sportswear, plus an ITV trailer) after the whole of the main game between Middlesbrough and Arsenal had been crammed into 10 minutes. Altogether, the early-evening programme, an hour and a quarter long, contained just over half an hour's action, with 12 minutes of ads (at an estimated £120,000 per minute).

That left another 30-odd minutes for chat, yet we seemed to hear little from Terry Venables, one of the programme's greatest assets, until the introduction near the end of something called Prozone. This turned out to be not a little white tablet that Leicester City supporters might feel in need of, but a wondrous machine on which coaches can track the movement of every player simultaneously throughout a game.

It proved utterly bewildering, and Venables' point that Michael Caddick had too easily allowed Michael Owen to run on and score would have been much more clearly made with pictures and one of Andy Gray's highlighters. The other main innovation was The Tactics Truck – a crib from Channel 4's cricket coverage – in which Middlesbrough's Ugo Ehiogu, having sportingly agreed to be interviewed after his sending-off, sat patiently in the aforementioned pantechnicon, while Andy Townsend told him where Boro had gone wrong defensively.

Des conducted interviews with Sunderland's Peter Reid and Bolton's Sam Allardyce, whose achievements deserved more air-time. If there was an editorial mistake, it lay in allocating only 60 seconds to Bolton's game, which most other media regarded as the story of the day, and could have been the fourth main match, with commentary dubbed on in London – if we must have commentary dubbed on. Pressure of editing-time may have been responsible for that error, and also the one mistake in an otherwise smooth technical production, when Clive Tyldesley's paean to Owen at the end of the Liverpool game was immediately followed by a clip with Gérard Houllier talking, it eventually became clear, about Robbie Fowler.

And with that, and Ally McCoist's three Goals Of The Day, it was suddenly full time, and Mel B, who was next on, was warning us: ''Don't go anywhere''. Even her stupendously revealing dress may have been insufficient to stop an exodus to the pub. Those who staggered home some three hours later for the second edition of The Premiership found Dishy Des in risqué mood, post-watershed (''On ITV we do it twice on Saturday nights'') while the blearier ones must have experienced the longest déjà vu of their lives.

The extra quarter of an hour was filled with 12 more minutes of Middlesbrough and Arsenal, another 60 seconds of adverts, a minute of Owen and Houllier and a brief review of the Sunday newspapers, which missed a trick in not showing the tabloid headline: ITV 1 BBC 0.

* The BBC yesterday claimed much higher audience figures for its Saturday evening programmes Celebrity Weakest Link (6.7million) and The National Lottery (7.6m) than The Premiership, which it said was watched by 4.3m. At 7pm on ITV last year Blind Date attracted more than 7m.