"the person who handled the issue was tied up"

Was that it? Or something further?

Playmobil reconstruction, please!

Presumably to a chair with their bare feet in a bucket of water and electrodes attached to their testicles, whilst the management they'd been telling for 6 months that it was a possiblility and they really out to put some sort of procedures in place were trying to work out exactly how to scapegoat them.

>Reg readers were quick to tell us about the problem

I'd be quicker to admit to a bit of wife beating and a serious smack/crack habit than to going near GMTV - ITV at all really. That wouldn't be going on yer CV, would it? "Interests: Watching low brow telly, browsing GMTV website, taking my budgie for a walk, reading celebrity autobiographies" etc.

Name and shame the feckers!

Checking the website this morning, all was OK. However, it seems the link farm page is back this afternoon!

Many domain vendors turn expired domains into a link spam page automatically. It's quite familiar to anyone who often uses search engines, when a domain expires and a tantalising text fragment in Google's cache is all you now can find about Venezualan beaver cheese.

If the domain is now popping in and out of existence it suggests that this is what happened, as DNS caches slowly update their idea of the web server's IP address from the real one,. to the hoster's holding link-spam page, and back to the real server again.

One spam site swapped for another

I've seen ISPs? Registrars? serve up that same page - same colors, graphics, style, etc., but different links & key words - in place of the default 404 page. Sure it was spammers?

or, youve got a shite proxy ;)

This is common for registrars. I believe that Tucows (our registrar of domains where I work) does the same thing. They may first show a "hey, this domain name has expired" page, then when it fully lapses they put the link farm up there via changing the nameservers. Renew the domain name and poof, it goes back to the original nameservers.