County cricket teams tend not to have their own dedicated television channels, leaving that kind of thing to swanky football clubs such as Manchester United and Real Madrid. Give it time, though. Or, at any rate, give it time, coupled with an (at present) unforeseeably enormous and lucrative surge in public interest in the county game.

In the meantime, Lancashire do at least have their own dedicated weekly half-hour of public access broadcasting, called, with that refreshing straightforwardness that one associates with the sport in the shires, The Lancashire Cricket Show. And, OK, so it's not exactly MUTV in terms of depth, penetration and deeply alarming, monomaniacal intensity. But it's still a contribution and, indeed, was nominated last year, in its first season, for a Royal Television Society sports broadcasting award, the Oscars of programmes about people in sports kit.

The Lancashire Cricket Show goes out on Channel M, a service dedicated to providing items of interest to people in the Greater Manchester area, and, in the old days of Clive Lloyd, pre-Freeview, no one beyond Chorley would ever have got to hear of it, let alone watch it. But that's the wonder of digital broadcasting. If Gareth Cross is being asked to tell us the best away ground he has played at and the name of his favourite book, then, in the modern world, that news can be flashed across the country to anyone with the right set-top box.

Cross's favourite away ground, then, is Trent Bridge and his favourite book is The Da Vinci Code, which is also, by coincidence, “the only book I've ever read”, he said. Pardon me for saying so, but you just don't get this level of detail from Wisden. At any rate, it's a handy supplement.

Opening the programme's 2008 run, Martyn Hindley, the presenter, stood at Old Trafford against a backdrop dominated by one of the biggest grey clouds seen on television beyond the National Geographic Channel. You could have asked for no greater evidence that a new cricket season was upon us and that we were in Manchester, although Hindley's blue cagoule, zipped to the neck, was another clue.

Yet optimism was, of course, abundant, the show amply communicating that unique feeling at this time of the year, when the sap is up among the squad, when the energy levels are high and when the centrally contracted players are pretending for a couple of weeks that this is where their heart is. We got interviews with Stuart Law and Andrew Flintoff, a visit to the team photo session and some action (possibly for diehards only) from the pre-season tour to the United Arab Emirates. (You may say that it was ambitious to shoot a cricket match with one, fixed-position camera, but at least that one fixed camera was trained on the wicket, rather than, say, on the man at long leg.)

All in all there was material compressed into this half-hour that would have kept Arsenal TV in programming for a fortnight. A whole channel may be stretching it, but an hour wouldn't hurt, would it?

On the topic of stretching things, Eurosport is at the European Weightlifting Championships in Lignano Sabbiadoro, Italy, where the big story in the men's 56 kilogram division was the return of Halil Mutlu, the three-times Olympic champion from Turkey, after three years away from the chalk dust.

What kept him? Well, a two-year ban for anabolic steroid use got the holiday rolling, although, interestingly, the “pocket dynamo” (Mutlu stands 4ft 11in in his leotard) then added another year off of his own volition. We all need a break from time to time.

As the moment neared for the Turk's big re-entry at 120 kilograms in the snatch, David Goldstrom and David Morgan in the commentary box could barely contain themselves. The cameras watched Mutlu padding around backstage, making last-minute adjustments to his muscles. “He's still got his swagger,” Goldstrom purred. But then it's hard not to swagger, I would suggest, when your thighs are as thick as postboxes and nearly as tall as you are. In those circumstances, swaggering is pretty much your default mode, walk-wise.

Disaster, though. At his first attempt the compact Turk barely got the bar above his ankles. At which point the atmosphere in the commentary box seemed to turn. “I have to say, physically, he doesn't look anywhere near as impressive as he used to,” Morgan said. “He looks soft,” Goldstrom said. The second attempt was no better. “I've never seen anyone come back after three years away from the platform and do well,” Morgan said. Now he tells us.

Just one failed lift away, potentially, from the start of another holiday, Mutlu braced himself - and virtually threw the bar aloft. He's back - like cricket, only shorter. “Olympic champions do it when it matters,” Goldstrom screamed.

Dedicated weightlifting channel, anyone? Oh, hang on - we've already got one. It's called Eurosport.