Come any big sporting occasion – say, the football World Cup or the Olympic games – it is a long-standing tradition for national newspapers to highlight exactly how many people and how much money the BBC will spend on covering it. But then it is licence fee payers' money, after all. It usually happens a month or two before the big event, so hats off to today's Sun for blasting the BBC for the amount of money it will spend on the 2012 London Olympics a full three years before it takes place. "The BBC is to land licence-payers with a £3 million bill to send sport staff to cover the London Olympics from Manchester – just a year after it relocates from the capital." It always did strike Monkey as peculiar timing to move the BBC Sport department out of the capital a year before 2012. The money will go on "flights, train fares, taxis and accommodation", says the Sun. They forgot the bagels! A BBC spokesman said: "Plans for covering the 2012 Olympics are still being developed and we can't speculate on the costs involved." They had better start – it's not the first time they are going to be asked about this.
