Sport has such a position of broadcasting pre-eminence that all other areas of life have to fight for the few minutes left

Get in the cans, plug in the ansafone and prepare to spend the summer in the Princess Diana position: lying prone on the couch. The BBC yesterday announced that more hours will be dedicated to sport in its schedules over the next three months than ever before in its history.

In addition to the regular summer fare of wall-to-wall Wimbledon, ball- by-ball Test matches, hole-by-hole Open and Murray-by-Murray grands prix, the corporation is bringing us over 50 hours of Euro 96 and 300 hours of the Olympic Games from Atlanta. Television Centre has, any rational observer can only conclude, gone sport-tastic. Not so much a licence fee as a ticket to paradise: there's more packed in there than into a Sri Lankan cricketer's waistband.

Never before, boast the BBC publicity output, has the sports fan been so well served. Not simply in terms of quantity, but in the quality of the coverage: more cameras, more angles, more experts, more action replays. Linking it all will be Des Lynam, who will become the other man in most of our lives this summer, his urbane presence a constant in most households; his bank manager must be praying he's on a hourly rate.

Many people might regard the prospect of watching all this sport as a monumental waste of time. Just think what you could do instead with 600 hours, they say: Decorate the house, replant the garden, read the latest AS Byatt novel (well, three quarters of it at least). The answer to that is that few will watch every minute.

But the fan will be grateful it is there, ready to dip in to whenever the desire catches. Ah, the critics of this bonanza will say (and in the case of some female newspaper columnists already are saying) where there is feast, there must be famine, the extended sports coverage has to take the time from somewhere; great acreage of other BBC departments' air-space is being shamelessly given over to one interest group, they whinge. No more summer repeats, fewer soaps, sitcom hours drastically cut: it is hard to see why anyone should worry. But this is the crux of the complaint: sport has now achieved a position of broadcasting pre-eminence, so that all the other areas of life are obliged to fight for the few minutes of air-time it does not consume.

Yesterday a radio producer rang me to ask if I would contribute to a debate analysing why sport has achieved this position of total dominance in BBC thinking. Her theory was that it was Nick Hornby's fault: that he made football fashionable among the television programme controller classes, who are in a position to see their tastes reflected in the schedules; tomorrow night's four-hour celebration of George Best's 50th birthday on BBC2 (set the video now) being a case in point, she said.

Now Nick Hornby may be responsible for many things - two excellent books, a witty stage play and the way the sunlight glints off the top of his head into the eyes of anyone sitting behind him at Highbury among them - but the BBC's Summer of Sport can hardly be blamed on him, particularly as football will account for less than a tenth of it.

It seems to be far more likely that Sky's success has something to do with it. Since Sky, appreciating that many of us are prepared to pay pounds 300 a year to satisfy our obsession, put a competitive bomb into the market, the BBC has started to take its position as the principal terrestial broadcaster of sport much more seriously. In part this is because they realise if they don't look after the big sporting occasions - lots of prime coverage, plenty of pre-event build-up, good highlights packages - the organisers now have somewhere else to disappear to.

In part it is because since Sky's arrival they are paying considerably more for coverage rights and thus feel they ought to show airtime value for their money. But mainly, as the enormous publicity campaign for the Summer of Sport indicates, they are making a political point here.

The effort is to show, by the unimpeachable splendour of their coverage, certain events should be protected by law from Mr Murdoch: you hardly get to hang on to the crown jewels if you relegate them to BBC2 while a re-run of Two Point Four Children runs on BBC1.

I may be wrong, but Nick Hornby probably didn't enter their calculations. The vindication of the BBC's assumption that sport is the axis the world spins on will come in the viewing figures. While the other broadcasters use such data for commercial purposes, the BBC use it to prove that they are spending the taxpayers' money appropriately. There will be some nervous BBC executives huddled over fax machines over the next few weeks. It may not be much comfort, but I can guarantee them one thing: there will be at least one person watching.