Any ban would rule them out of this weekend’s Trophy semi-finals, when Widnes face Warrington on Saturday, and Wigan take on the holders, Castleford, on Sunday.
Skerrett got his marching orders in the quarter-final victory against St Helens for appearing to throw a punch, while Hulme was shown the red card for an alleged head-butt in his side’s defeat of Bradford.Wigan have been cheered by the news that their injured captain, Shaun Edwards, has not torn a cruciate ligament after all.Wigan feared the worst when the 28-year-old Great Britain half-back pulled up during the 24-22 Trophy win against St Helens at the weekend.a scan has cleared Edwards of any major damage, although he has a lot of fluid on the knee, and is still rated as extremely doubtful for the match against Castleford.”I’m just very relieved there’s no long-term damage,” said Edwards. RUGBY LEAGUE Kelvin Skerrett, the Wigan prop, and the Widnes loose-forward, Paul Hulme, will learn their Regal Trophy fates tomorrow night, when they appear before the Rugby Football League disciplinary committee in Leeds, following their dismissals lastweekend. But I do know that I like meat loaf and even, once in a while, being told to eat it.. The sheer scale of the superhighway will permit the creation of any number of niches and it will clearly be a better world if people pursue a variety of interests rather than all watching Neighbours or Sylvester Stallone. The fear is, of course, that the existence of this vast electronic landscape will deaden people’s ability and desire to create niches. Locked away, alone with their screens, will they not simply dissolve into cyberspace, losing the context which once gave them an interest in birds or trains?Those are the two poles of the arguments about interactivity and the superhighway Take your pick I don’t know.

The homogenising tendencies of the old, passivemedia will be replaced by the pluralist forces of interactivity.This is, in fact, a surprisingly good argument. There will, in other words, be a net increase in genuine cultural diversity. People will feel more at home, not less, rowing about the interactive future. Art house movies and obscure documentaries will discover vast new audiences. Global micro-communities will be formed of trainspotters, twitchers or those poor, sad souls who like Anderson Country on Radio 4. The argument is that the old broadcasting and media distributionssystems favour the lowest common denominator – the blockbuster film or the mindless soap – because these tend to push out more specialised interests from the limited amount of available space.But with interactivity, and therefore freedom, people can pursue their own specialised interests.

They will not want, like their teenage children, to surf the net, they will want to navigate their way around it, probably in a rowing boat.And this leads on to the argument advanced by the smartest of the technocrats – that this new, interactive technology is a genuine, moral improvement on the old, non-interactive systems. People will not want to lose themselves in the net, they will want to survivewith their prejudices and tastes intact. The idea is that, in time, people will feel safe buying anything with their lo go attached.There is something reassuring about this impulse to limit our own freedom when confronted with the chaos of contemporary choice It speaks of a need for security and authority. So now Microsoft, the biggest software company in the world and probably the technological leader on the superhighway, is pouring out corporate advertising simply to make its name stick. In the midst of the chaos that floods down the fibre-optic cable, a sign saying Marks & Spencer, BBC or Virgin will be clutched at gratefully.

The name matters more than the product.What will count on the superhighway is familiarity, precisely because it will be at such a premium. They know that, faced with an undifferentiated sea of goodies, the consumer will always play safe, going for what they recognise Branding will be everything Look at the whole Virgin phenomenon. Branson’s company is now producing a cola whose sole appeal is that it has Virgin on the can. So, rather than be free, you turn to Carla, an authority figure, and ask her.The smarter technocrats have worked this out.