if you have 8 million followers on twitter. i don t know why got that, because of the game, but i have other interests like other people. you know, it s a lot of people. like, i get that. so we see piers morgan sign up for a show that would be streamed in australia and the us thing about politics and talking about sport and a variety of issues so that does not appeal? no, i can have my view about things that i feel are important, which i ve done. climate change for me is really, really important. i ve got four kids. i m not worried about. it s not about me coming ahead. my generation will probably be all right, who knows? but i worry about my boys and worry about their children and their children s children. you know, are they going to have a planet that can actually live on?
to watch sky sports. same with bt sport with the champions league, if they suddenly lost a champions league now, would people bother with a subscription for bt sport? and the same way with the sky sports. so tv channels pay huge, huge amounts of money for it. bbc pays a fair amount as well, not to the levels, they can t compete. a secondary question, which is some of the investors into football clubs, so if we take paris with its connections to qatar, man city with its connections to abu dhabi, the newcastle saudi arabia story that s ongoing, that money is being pushed into football partly as an investment but partly because via the media, these countries or these organisations can change their public image. are you always comfortable with that? not always, no, no. i don t know what we do about it. i think it s every club s supporter, they don t like it but then when it happens to their club, that s ultimately what they want because it might give them a greater chance of success, which
and his come back at old trafford that happens at 3pm on saturday afternoon, good for you and this programme for people to wait to see it but it is an anachronism that a modern sport like football with a modern product like the premier league is not letting you see a moment like that at the time? i think that s one of the great wonders of the premier league that they do that because it does not really happen anywhere else. and it s done notjust to make sure that crowds of people still go to football matches all the time, which is you want, full houses are really important to football and i think we ve noticed that perhaps more than ever over this period during the pandemic where we ve had empty grounds. full football stadiums look better on television, so if you started putting every game live on television, the crowds i think would inevitably be sparser. and i think that would diminish from the product that you re putting on television, yes, you can miss the odd big moment, but in a w
but am i comfortable with it? no, not really. gary, we ve talked a lot about football but it s notjust sport for you at the moment. you ve got a new game show coming up on itv, it s called sitting on a fortune. just give us the elevator pitch. i don t want to build up too much because it s. you never know until it actually airs. but we recorded a few episodes, and it s going to be primetime sunday evenings i believe on itv within about a month or so, a month and a half. it s sitting on a fortune, and i think it s brilliant and the audiences that came to watch it thought it was amazing. it s got feel good factor, people winning loads of money. it s got tension. it s gotjeopardy right from the start. i think it works. but i ve already built it up too much.
than anything else we ve seen on the euros again this summer. so, and there s a lot of competition and bbc had to fight. i hate talking about this for myself because obviously i realise how fortuitous i am, but bbc wanted me to have. football on television and i m very grateful for that. and as we get this plurality of output from the footballing world, notjust in terms of punditry but where we can see the games committee, you think there s a risk we are asking too much of fans? so, a leicester city fan may have to pay the licence even on top of that you might pay for sky and bt and amazon, it s quite a long list now. do you think that s the sport being reasonable towards fans? i mean, i think when you look at it, particularly when you made the sky, in particular who went obviously at the start of the premier league, i mean, they ve survived on football. they put a lot of money for it, and they ve helped football along the way, but you can imagine if suddenly they lost the rights compl