Pick TV is a funny channel. It exists pretty much as a means for Sky to advertise their wares to a free-to-air audience, hence its place on Freeview et al. When it was known as Sky 3, it even had a few shows that people might actually want to watch, to boot.

Now, however, it’s anything but funny, consisting almost exclusively of ageing fly-on-the-wall series and blooper shows. To glance at its schedule is to peer into a cold, dark chasm of creative bankruptcy. It’s mainly awful.

Sky Sports F1 HD launch

However! Sky do occasionally still use the channel to give non-subscribers a little sniff of what they’re missing on the other side of the wall in the perfumed pay TV garden – the Free Weekend Pass, for example.

Now, you might not have noticed – they’ve been pretty subtle about it – but Sky launched a little something called Sky Sports F1 HD on Friday night. The first programme was a 2012 preview edition of the imaginatively titled The F1 Show, the channel’s regular magazine show presented by Georgie Thompson and Ted Kravitz. It seemed to go down quite well.

Wisely, that show is being pumped out on Pick TV – on Sunday night at 10pm (hat tip to @f1zone via @wtf1couk). What better way to convert the undecided viewer?

That’s being preceded by a Grand Prix Greats edition of Time Of Our Lives at 9pm, featuring Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill and Murray Walker looking back at the British success of the ’90s. That’s also being broadcast on Sky Sports F1 HD a number of times this week, though from what I can gather the programme is a couple of years old.

BBC counter punch

It’s been amusing to watch Sky and the BBC manoeuvring around each other in the off season. Sky welcomed selected bloggers through their doors, so the BBC felt it had to do the same, for example.

So on Friday, an hour before Sky launched its F1 channel, Jake Humphrey and David Coulthard appeared on The One Show. Probably not a particularly effective counter punch – it was all rather panto.

But it goes to show that this competition between broadcasters is clearly making them both try harder, which can only increase the quality of coverage for viewers – wherever they’re watching.