The Gardeners' World Blog

When I last blogged, I mentioned that football's Africa Cup of Nations was one of several sporting events coming up which the BBC would be televising, as well as carrying coverage on this website and on our radio stations.

Now this biennial event is upon us, getting under way in Ghana on Sunday with a match between the hosts and Guinea. It runs until 10 February, with 32 matches packed into those three weeks.

All of those matches will be screened by the BBC to viewers in the UK, mostly on interactive, or red button, television.

The BBC's World Service, meanwhile, will be offering fantastic radio coverage of the event in Africa, where it is Fast Track radio programme is hugely popular with football fans, and beyond.

People have said the BBC loves an anniversary. Maybe so, though my formative years as a producer on the Today programme on Radio 4 were with an editor who hated anniversary stories. "Lazy journalism", he called them - with some justice, because revealing something new is much more difficult than recording that it's 40 years since some event or other happened.

All the same, this month we'll be raising a glass to a 60th anniversary within BBC Sport. It's 60 years since Sports Report first took to the air - and for the past 14 of those years it's been a stalwart of Radio Five Live.

At 5pm on Saturday afternoons, there's the wonderful old music; the peerless James Alexander Gordon reading the football results; and then analysis and reaction from all the day's sport.