Media: All about ... The Sky/Virgin Media dispute.(employees of Virgin Media Group Ltd. and British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC in a relationship)(Financial report)

How are the companies faring in the ongoing feud? Alasdair Reid reports.

Stephen Burch sometimes sounds like a lovelorn teenager, hanging (to borrow from that most plaintive of Debbie Harry choruses) on the telephone. 'I'd take his call in a heartbeat, and even have dinner with him,' he told anyone willing to listen last week.

And what a couple they'd make - Burch, the chief executive of Virgin Media, and James Murdoch, the chief executive of BSkyB.

Actually, forget Debbie Harry - surely Shakespeare can provide us with a better fix on this. It is, perhaps, a classic playing-out of Romeo and Juliet syndrome. After all, their two tribes are at war, Virgin having served a writ on Sky following the breakdown of talks about how much Sky wants to charge Virgin for carriage of its basic package of channels.

On the other hand, this is hardly an analogy worth pursuing. We at Campaign have no stomach for …