It's not easy being the BBC. Well, apart from its guaranteed income of £3 billion a year, of course. I'm talking about its sports coverage. It gets slated when it loses sports rights, and now it's been slated for showing too much. What to do?
I'm talking about BBC1's line-up last Saturday, which devoted nearly 12 hours to sport, including three live Six Nations rugby matches top and tailed by Football Focus and Match of the Day.
As the Guardian's Barney Ronay pointed out on Tuesday- that's a lot, even for the most devoted armchair sports enthusiast, and the BBC has felt compelled to apologise to viewers who were not happy with the wall-to-wall sport.
Still, having shelled out £160 million of licence fee payers' cash to show the Six Nations, it's no wonder the Beeb wants to get value for money out of it.
And let's not forget the Six Nations is only on for six weekends out of the whole year. Was the coverage really so excessive?
Personally I was more offended by the choice of programme BBC1 chose to put out when it wasn't showing rugby - a lame clips show featuring "hilarious" out-takes of The Weakest Link.
Rewind a couple of Saturdays and the BBC1 primetime schedule was showing Stars In Their Eyes sound-a-like, The One and Only. Now that really was a waste of licence fee payers' money, surely?
But it's the BBC's mission to appeal to everyone, at least some of the time, and I can see how 12 hours of sport would have a sizeable portion of the nation hurling the remote control at the goggle box.
The solution, clearly, is a BBC Sport channel, which was first mooted in 1999 but appears no closer to becoming reality today than it did then. The possibility was last raised, as far as I can recall, by Roger Mosey's predecessor in the BBC Sport controller's job, Peter Salmon, three years ago.
But the move would prove unpopular with the BBC's commercial rivals and the very same viewers who were unhappy with all that rugby.
Putting sport on a channel which not everyone can receive - less of an issue today than it once was, given the widespread take-up of multi-channel TV - is also a potential banana skin, given that everyone's licence fee money helped buy the rights.
So in the short term it looks like we're stuck with it. Or, in my case, blessed with it, because I rather like rugby.
But nearly 12 hours of sport in a row on BBC1 was clearly an own goal on the scheduling front, meat and drink to the corporation's critics who say it already shows too much sport - it doesn't, in my view, but there you go.
Even a late afternoon break, sticking the middle game on BBC2, would have helped.
What of next year? There is a possibility that some Six Nations matches will be scheduled on a Friday night, as well as Saturday and Sunday. I'm not sure if this helps or not.
Mosey, in a recent BBC blog, said his position on the Friday night scheduling was "neutral". Viewers, who tend to either love or loathe their live sport, are likely to feel anything but.
