Office slackers have, mostly, enjoyed an excellent decade, as each succeeding technology has created new opportunities for discreet timewasting at the desk. There has been e-mail, the internet, Instant Messenger, Facebook, Twitter and now, best of all, television.

Now, of course, television hardly ranks among the technological breakthroughs of recent years, but watched over the internet it does, and that was how we arrived at a landmark moment for the medium last week when the office workers of Britain had eyes only for Andy Murray’s Wimbledon semi-final.

More than two million people tuned in to watch from their desks surreptitiously as the Scot slumped to defeat against Andy Roddick. That figure might represent only a small part of the total of ten million viewers who watched Roddick win the fourth set, but a proportion of 20 per cent shows that TV over the internet is coming of age. And, despite shrill warnings, the web largely coped with the extra demand — high-capacity office networks are nicely geared up for staff using the network for fun.

To a degree, of course, Wimbledon is exceptional; no doubt someone will be watching Toyah Willcox in a repeat of Cash in the Celebrity Attic at half-eleven, but you’d have to peer over a lot of shoulders to catch them at it. As the Ashes unfolds, however, with high hopes for a competitive series, the desire to see other weekday sporting events while chained to the desk may prove just as great as it was for watching Murray at Wimbledon.

Newspapers cottoned on some time ago to the potential demand for cricket with live score updates online, along with live text commentaries, but moving pictures always trump text — if the feed is reliable enough. Sky subscribers can watch live via a password-protected Sky Player, and there ought to be somebody in every office willing to keep the feed running on screen if there are no televisions in the vicinity. For the rest of us, there are three-minute highlight packages available at the end of each session at ECBtv, and on newspaper websites, too, which at least cuts down office timewasting to closer to an acceptable level.

Radio does not do well out of this development — TV watching at work is wisely done silently, which, clearly, doesn’t really suit Five Live. And this provides another illustration of why radio has ceased to be a growth medium. Instead, the more valuable emerging broadcast rights are likely to be for daytime clips — delivered, perhaps, immediately after a 100 metres final or at the end of every session during a Test match.

The other question is whether office television is any good for anything other than hot sporting occasions. Time Warner tested this theory to destruction, it might be argued, with the flop of Office Pirates, a comedy clips site whose rationale was the belief that people would be willing to forward slapstick humour to each other via e-mail. It lasted six months in 2006 and failed to generate more than a few hundred thousand monthly users — not enough to keep the project going.

Not much seems to have changed since; there may be several other comedy websites around, but as a mass viewing proposition, it is going nowhere. Sport, in other words, is the only game in town for office viewing, but then (apart from Britain’s Got Talent) it seems to have become the last remaining source of national glue, or however you want to describe the “shared experience”.

AEG deals with the loss of Michael Jackson

If Randy Phillips, the boss of AEG Live, the promoter of the ill-fated Michael Jackson tour, had been advising the Queen when Diana, Princess of Wales, died, there would have been no backlash against the Royal Family.

AEG could have been blamed for Jackson’s premature death, as, after all, it was the promoter that signed the frail singer up to 50 dates and paid Conrad Murray, Jackson’s controversial physician. But Mr Phillips, setting aside the all-too-familiar “we are a private company and we don’t have to say anything” refrain, simply kept communicating. He managed to express grief at Jackson’s death, give a credible explanation for Murray’s presence (“you don’t say no to the king of pop”), spell out exactly how much AEG could lose, and release pictures, then footage, of Jackson in rehearsals. A week later, nobody could speculate that AEG would go under or that Jackson was not, at least apparently, up to the demands of touring. With nobody else having much new to say, AEG became the source of the story, not its subject.

Mr Phillips is the kind of American who could sell you anything, which helps when you are promoting something as ephemeral as a pop concert. Just before the funeral, he was cheerfully admitting he intended to sell a DVD of the rehearsal footage, to defray the lost revenues from the summer concerts; nobody seemed to mind. Having made the commercialisation of grief so acceptable, AEG can fairly be said to have pulled off a PR triumph.

dan.sabbagh@thetimes.co.uk

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