What shall we do with a drunken sailor...

In fact, no one was drunk but everyone played at being sailors.

Yesterday (Thursday 19th June) I was privileged to be part of the first VT Communications Sailing Challenge. VT Communications (which provides transmission and distribution services for the BBC World Service and an increasing number of broadcasters worldwide) hosted a day of sailing and racing in the Solent - the piece of water off the southern coast of England that separates the Isle of Wight from the mainland.

The party was divided into two groups - team Victor and team Tango (teams VT, geddit?) and after breakfast at the foot of the Spinnaker Tower that dominates the Portsmouth skyline (and in which you can test your vertigo thanks to a glass floor 100m above the ground) we went off to our boats for a safety briefing and a bit of explanation about the way winches, sheets, and all the other bits and pieces of a modern sailing boat, work.

We set off, getting our sails hoisted and tacked over to Cowes on the Isle of Wight where we had a rather tasty (and well-earned) lunch. Then the important bit of the day got underway - a race back to Portsmouth with the two teams pitted against one another as the wind got up.

At first, team Tango - with VT Communications MD Doug Umbers on board (pictured) - stole a lead, at one point almost three boat lengths (and the boats were nearly 70' long). But with some excellent helming by Ruxandra Obreja of the BBC, ably assisted by Josh Sparks of VT, team Victor edged forward (disclosure - I was on the team Victor boat!). At the finishing line, team Victor was ahead by less than half a boat length - and won!

Pure exhilaration all round, and well done to everyone on that boat, comiserations to those on Tango. I helmed it back into Portsmouth, managing to cut through the waves and soak Doug Umbers, Director of Broadcast at VTC - sorry, Doug. Medals all round back at the port, rounding off a truly great day. Thanks to everyone at VTC.

AIB Awards gather pace

The 2008 AIB Media Excellence Awards are gathering pace, with more and more organisations around the world entering. At the AIB head office we're getting lots of calls from broadcasters throughout the world who are now working on their entries - in the past few days we've had enquiries from Egyptian TV, radio stations in Argentina and Brazil, broadcasters in the USA and the Far East.

All this means that we're going to have a remarkable contest this year with more entries than ever before. We've been asked by some entrants if we can extend the deadline for submissions, and we're responded by moving the closing date from 30 June to 19 July 2008. We hope this helps!

It's also encouraging that there's still excellent feedback coming in from last year's Awards and the gala evening we ran at Clothworkers' Hall in the City of London to present the prizes. Nigel Chapman, Director of BBC World Service, said to me on Monday evening that he's keen to attend this year as he'd heard really good things about the event and wanted to see for himself. That's great - so why not enter today? See www.aibawards.com.

Worrying news from the UAE

I'm very concerned about reports coming from the UAE that GEO TV has been given 48 hours to leave Dubai where it produces a good deal of programming for its audiences in Pakistan. It seems that the Dubai authorities have said GEO will lose its licence to operate in Dubai if it does not take two programmes off the air. Capital Talk and According to Me are the two programmes identified as being at the root of the problem.

This isn't the first time GEO has suffered in Dubai. During the state of emergency imposed late last year, GEO was told to stop broadcasting from the UAE. At the time GEO said that it would relocate its international operations to Hong Kong if the UAE government continued to hassle it. I suspect the move may come sooner than later.

My concern is that many international broadcasters are moving all or part of their production facilities to other countries - the BBC World Service is moving many of its Hindi- and Urdu-language staff to India and Pakistan, for example - and this means that pressure can be exerted locally to force "unwelcome" programming to be dropped. Responding to a letter in this week's edition of Ariel, the BBC staff newspaper, Behrouz Afagh, head of the World Service Asia-Pacific region, said: "As for the BBC partnership in Pakistan, our editorial independence and integrity is not and was never under any threat, and our FM bulletins are going out live now, in any case." He's confident there's no problem. Perhaps this latest news from Dubai will cause a reassessment of the situation.