Executives at ITV will be in need of a padded room by the time they are through dealing with the UK competition authorities. The Office of Fair Trading’s call for an investigation into ITV’s sale of Friends Reunited, a social network, is the latest setback for the struggling broadcaster. In February, the Competition Commission blocked ITV’s attempts to collaborate with rivals online. Two months ago, it rejected ITV’s plea to relax restrictions on ad rates.

Now the hapless broadcaster must wait up to six months as government watchdogs decide whether the sale of its social networking arm to DC Thomson, a newspaper publisher, is likely to harm customers of – wait for it – genealogy websites. Technocrats worry that combining Friends, which runs Genes Reunited, the country’s second-biggest genealogy website, and DC Thomson, which owns the third-biggest, could result in higher prices for family history buffs.