For a brief but disconcerting moment, it looked as though Lewis Hamilton might win his first grand prix and the people responsible for the television pictures might not get round to showing it.

In the closing minutes in Canada, the producers decided to watch Takuma Sato overtaking Fernando Alonso. Then they were further distracted by the scrap for second place. So there was a top note of urgency in the voice of James Allen, ITV’s race commentator, who could sense a career-defining moment coming (for himself as well as for Hamilton) and had no special desire to spend it on board the car of Nick Heidfeld (no disrespect).

“I’d like to see Lewis on his last corners,” Allen said, a little quaveringly. And thankfully, as if by magic, the producers took us there, in time for Allen to ramp up the volume and cry. “Lewis Hamilton . . . wiiiiiins.” (Sometimes it pays to play it straight.)

With that, we were thrust live into the victor’s cockpit, sharing his radio link with the pitlane, an intimate privilege, enabling us to hear from Ron Dennis, the McLaren team principal, whose voice, with its faint overtone of Essex lockup, sounds vaguely threatening even while offering congratulations. “You won that fair and square,” Dennis said. “So I won’t be shutting you in a meat freezer.” (I made that second bit up).

Then another crew member read Hamilton the finishing positions. I’m not sure how attentively Hamilton was listening to this detailed rundown, given how occupied he was with whooping and driving with his hands off the steering wheel (not recommended, by the way, in any of the manuals).

In any case, with Coronation Street looming ominously on the horizon, ITV cut hard into an advertising break. This could have killed the jubilation stone dead, in the classic, commercial channel style. Except. That. Blow. Me. There. Was. Murray. Walker. Advertising. Tickets. For. Silverstone.

Good to have him around, even in oblique form, at a moment in motor racing’s history that he would have enjoyed. And how pleasing to note that even now, six years after his formal retirement, his trousers remain on fire.

Back in Canada, the warm glow was coming off Hamilton. “What a megastar we’ve got on our hands,” Martin Brundle said. And if those hands hadn’t been full of megastar, he’d have been rubbing them with glee. Imagine the champagne fountaining around the offices of ITV Sport this week as its investment in Formula One finally turned golden.

Let’s face it, it had all gone horribly quiet. The sport that ITV expensively bought into ten years ago was widely felt to have become a processional bore and a near character vacuum, skewered by politics that most of us barely understood. Walker retired – a huge loss in terms of the sport’s chances of reaching beyond its core audience and luring the merely curious – and Steve Rider arrived from the BBC, bringing to the production his astonishing, flawless but slightly dampening professionalism. (You always know what you’re going to get with Rider. It’s one of the reasons some people preferred Jim Rosenthal).

Enter Hamilton, though, and suddenly it’s all podium finishes and the programmes suddenly look like a plausible way to eat a hole in your Sunday again. Britain’s got talent. With a backstory. And a dad. Television loves a dad. The emotion of it all was such that even Rider, at one point – as unthinkable as this may seem – was reduced to a gabbling mess. Who can blame him?

Elsewhere, the time has come to post a small ad in Exchange & Mart.

“Wanted. New holy grail. Top-class televised sport seeks tantalisingly unattainable goal, for quests. Background in mythology desirable. No used fleeces, please.” And why? Because, thanks to Phil “The Power” Taylor, darts’ original holy grail – the nine-dart finish – is starting to wear the unremarkable familiarity of a box of Quality Street.

On Saturday evening, in Bolton at the UK Open, The Power was at it again. Even as a large portion of the nation was readying itself to choose a Joseph for Lord Lloyd-Webber, The Power was stepping up to the oche to demonstrate that, for the true artist, any dream won’t, in fact, do. Rather, the true artist chooses one dream and sticks with it – in this case, the perfect check-out from 501, finishing on a double: three visits to the board, seven treble 20s, a treble 19 and a double 12.

For this, the organisers rewarded The Power with £20,000 – which works out at a cool £2,222 per dart, plus change. Don’t you wish you had practised a little harder, in the bedroom of your youth?

Yet it was the third time Taylor has done this at UK Opens and the fifth time that he has done it on television, so what was once a unicorn is in danger of becoming a West Highland terrier – nice enough, but you can’t deny that you see them around a bit. It’s a problem.