Athletics in the UK: The Rise and Fall of the BAF

66 The joint standing committee (JSC) was said) in the country of her birth. A related issue reared its head in Edinburgh. The rules concerning any advertising that could be seen on television were very strict and political advertising was forbidden. Contrary to these rules, Edinburgh Council had included a political slogan “Edinburgh - Against Apartheid” on their advertising boards in the stadium; they refused to remove them and ITV pulled out of the transmission. This was not a good start to the TV contract and everyone was unhappy; Dairy Crest refused to pay their sponsorship, Pascoe’s company was out of pocket, ITV threatened to withhold the rights fee and the JSC had egg on its face. The resulting insurance claim took a very long time to settle, by which time another dispute arose. This time, ITV complained that the planned “Peugeot Talbot Indoor Games”, to take place on 31 January 1987, was not good enough and, moreover, was scheduled for a different date from the one originally agreed. They would not, and did not, cover it. The JSC had, of course, decided that payments to athletes for indoor events were not necessary so, without a budget, Andy Norman was unable to attract athletes of sufficient quality to satisfy ITV. By now, with the experiences of two disputes with ITV, overspending on payments to athletes and other organisational problems, the JSC realised that it needed to find a more efficient way of managing the contracts (especially the budgets) and asked the two treasurers to review the systems and come up with some suggestions. The review of the JSC operations revealed that there was no real management of the budgets at all. Income had been divided according to the points system but there had never been any organised method of accounting for overall commercial income and costs. In particular, no serious attempt had been made to reconcile the separately prepared accounts of the AAA and the BAAB with the figures produced by the JSC. To complicate matters, the AAA and BAAB had, in their wisdom, decided to change the ends of their financial years from 31 March to 30 th September which meant that, instead of making up their accounts for a normal twelve months, an eighteen month account to 30 September 1986 was compiled, reverting thereafter to twelve month periods to 30 September. This made a true comparison year against year impossible for several years and was made worse by the fact that the TV and marketing