WHEN you make a mistake, make it a whopper. On July 19th, Saudi and other Gulf Arab viewers sat down to watch what they thought would be a scheduled children's programme, broadcast from France. Instead, they were treated to 30 minutes of “Club Privé au Portugal”, a hardcore pornographic film intended for liberal-minded viewers in France's Pacific territories.

To add insult to injury (or perhaps irony to delight), the film was beamed to Arabia by a Saudi-controlled satellite operator, Arabsat, whose lucrative partnership with Canal France International (CFI), a state-financed French television company, has now apparently been cancelled. French diplomats scrabbled to undo the damage, the foreign ministry apologising profusely. The Saudis were unimpressed. The French channel had offended Islamic views on decency, said Arabsat, and that was that.

So what actually happened? The fatal, last-minute switch in channels seems to have been made by France Télécom, not by the chastened CFI. With a Middle Eastern audience of millions of viewers at stake, somewhere in France there is a weekend technician lying very low.