TNT KILLED THE TV STAR

Looking back on a year in which cycling fans faced soaring costs to watch cycling on TV, Adam Becket explores the longer-term consequences

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It's 5:57pm in south London, 12 September 2005, and the shadows are lengthening at the Oval. Steve Harmison bowls the final ball of the men's Ashes; Justin Langer misjudges it, the ball glances off him, runs away to the boundary for four leg byes, and the umpires call stumps. England fans launch into wild celebration, having won the Ashes for the first time in 18 years – and at that exact same moment, live Test cricket disappears from UK free-to-air television. The consequences were almost immediate: viewing figures collapsed – from a peak of 8.4 million viewers during that 2005 Ashes to barely a single million – and cricket slipped from the national conversation to something closer to a niche interest.

Almost 20 years on, at 7:32pm on 27 July 2025, rain is still slick on the cobbles of the Champs-Élysées as Wout van Aert sweeps through the final corner of stage 21 of the Tour de France. Moments later, Tadej Pogačar rolls across the line to secure his fourth yellow jersey – and as the day's coverage wraps up, the world's biggest race disappears from UK screens. From next year, ITV will no longer televise the Tour, the exclusive UK rights having been sold to Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), parent company of TNT Sports. Earlier in the year, the cost of watching all the other big races jumped from £6.99 per month on Discovery+ to £30.99 on TNT Sports – a sharp rise that echoes cricket's slide into subscription-only (relative) obscurity. The parallel isn't perfect, but the warning is hard to ignore: when access narrows, audiences inevitably shrink, and a sport begins to slip from the national consciousness.

Turning off

A recent survey by