The Gardeners' World Blog

It's good news and bad news, I guess. The good news is that we sold out all 3000 tickets for this year's Sports Personality Of The Year in Birmingham within an hour of the box office opening this morning. The bad news is obviously that we can't accommodate any more people within the NEC and it turned out to be a fleeting opportunity to buy. But 3000 members of the public is, I hope, better than the zero in previous years; and we want the audience to contribute to the atmosphere of the show - which I'm sure they will.

Meanwhile, the debate about SPOTY continues in the papers...

Just a quick one to apologise for the technical problems we have had this morning, and at times in recent days, with updates to the website.

Won't go into the detail here - though will add some later if we're expecting significant problems to continue. But in the meantime, please bear with us and sorry for not being able to keep you up to date with Andy Murray's progress among other things.

We are working to fix the problems ASAP - our editorial team were updating our system as normal, but getting equally frustrated that those updates weren't reaching you!

FYI, Murray won 6-2 6-4. Normal service resumed for the lad, if not quite for us here in Shepherd's Bush yet...