Gag reflex

A NATIONAL newspaper, which I won’t name, once ran a feature across two pages with a headline along the lines of: “Why all this fuss about Big Brother?”

I realise I’m leaving myself open to similar charges of moral hypocrisy for what I’m about to write, so I can only hope that you indulge me.

But I don’t much care if Premier League footballer X has had an affair with game show contestant Y or not. Cheating on your wife/husband/partner is an unpleasant thing to do, but it’s not illegal.

Last on MOTD: The musical

IT’S been a season of unremitting weirdness in the Premier League; one so odd that I suspect it might have been scripted by the Goodies and directed by David Lynch. From the inexplicable late autumn collapse of Chelsea to the sudden ejection of Richard Keys and Andy Gray from the Sky Sports hype-o-craft to the inability of anyone to agree on a player of the year, nothing was ever quite as it seemed.

Last on MOTD: Roy Hodgson, architecture and morality

IT’S hard not to warm to Roy Hodgson. Well, unless you’re a Liverpool fan, for whom the very mention of his name conjures up images of home defeats against Blackpool and Wolves which, among a large gathering of like-minded souls, may create enough collective rage to blow a hole in the ozone layer above Albert Dock.

Blackpool’s fate (nine letters)

A BLACKPOOL-supporting TV producer’s clever rigging of the Countdown conundrum to have a dig at the troubles of rivals Preston earlier this week wasn’t the first time that sporting business has impinged on the climax of Channel Four’s cardigan-clad celebration of wordplay and whimsy.

Last on MOTD: Film 2011 with Steve Bruce

I DON’T think I’ll ever get over that sense of disorientation that comes with unexpectedly seeing someone I know on television. And that’s despite the fact that my grandparents, without explanation, once pitched up on a live Central TV magazine show in the late 1980s playing La Bamba on the maracas. (As far as I’m aware, it was a one-off, although I do feel Clive James missed a trick by not snapping them up.)

Last on MOTD: The BRMB derby and the royal who wasn’t there

THERE’S a commercial radio station in Birmingham where they’re convinced that their local Premier League teams are last on Match of the Day every week. So they’ve made a billboard slogan out of it.