I can actually remember the TT being televised live once, albeit briefly. It was in 1996 which was, I think, the second year of Greenlight's contract. I can't remember which channel it was on, but probably Sky Sports. The start of the Formula One race was shown from the Grandstand, and coverage then switched to Union Mills. Unfortunately one of the early riders through Union Mills was Dave Goodley who crashed heavily live on TV. If I remember rightly the plug was immediately pulled on the live coverage as it was not known how serious it was - in the event I don't think Dave was too badly hurt.

This shows one of the problems with live coverage of an event as potentially dangerous as the TT, or road racing anywhere for that matter. Robert Dunlop's tragic accident at the North West this year was seen by many people on the live streaming. Perhaps the answer would be to have a short delay, perhaps 30 seconds or so, so that if anything untoward does happen the plug can be pulled so to speak.

I think Greenlight did a reasonably good job on the whole and brought quite a few new ideas to the coverage over the years. One thing that always disappointed me though was the lack of imagination in their vantage points. Race after race, year after year, every lap seems to be the same - Bray Hill, Quarter Bridge, Ballacraine, Parliament Square, Gooseneck, Signpost. Videovision, who previously had the contract, used to be much more imaginative and would make the effort to get to all the out of the way places. However I think the difference was that for most of Greenlight's contract they were under great time pressure to produce same-day highlights programmes for TV, so the camera crews had to be somewhere they could get away from quickly. Videovision on the other hand were generally just producing a highlights video a couple of months after the event, so could afford the luxury of filming from more inaccessible places.