THE work on Oxfordshire’s main television transmitter has been an absolute shambles.

There is just no other way to look at the situation which leaves 410,000 households with no certainty of when they will be able to get a proper signal from the antenna at Beckley.

Work has been carried out for months to ready it for the switchover to digital television next year. That suffered delays and then we had the antenna – not generally known for combustibility — catching fire.

Now it has emerged a new antenna will have to be bought and installed, with Arqiva — the company doing the work — unable to give any timeframe whatsoever.

It’s provoking outrage but what officialdom is seemingly unable to grasp is that there are two factors fuelling this.

Most people would grudgingly accept the work has to be done. But there is a complete lack of information being given to hundreds of thousands of people affected.

Snippets are sneaked out on websites but your average viewer is not going to keep checking an obscure Internet site every day.

The announcement of the work was thus buried, as was news of the delays and now the fact that the transmitter is completely broken.

This has gone beyond mere inconvenience and someone, somewhere, should be offering more than a mere token apology.