A pointless activity…and I’m not just talking about England’s performance in the World Cup!

I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m heartily sick of sports coverage on the television…it simply seems to drown out virtually everything else. The last straw was the coverage of Wimbledon today.  From 1.45 through to 6.00 tennis it is on both BBC1 and BBC2.  Now I may be stupid but even I know that you can’t watch both channels at the same time.  I’m sure that the BBC would say well it gives you the choice of which match to watch and of course they’re right but isn’t that what the red button is about…something used to considerable effect during the Olympics in 2012.  Am I being unreasonable?  Well to sports nuts I suppose I am but if, like me, you really don’t give a damn if Murray wins a second title or whether England will fail to progress further than the first round of the World Cup (yes I know they haven’t) it begs the question what am I actually paying my licence fee for?  At least when I subscribe to Sky I have a choice of whether I pay for the Sports Channels or not…and of course I don’t.

The problem appears to be that if you don’t like sport you are, in some way or other, an incomplete person.  That was the tenor of the response from the BBC when I complained about the tennis coverage last year.  It really is about time that those of us for whom sport is a worthless experience stood up and said so.  My visceral distaste for any sport goes back to my experience in school where everyone was expected to be good at it…healthy body, healthy mind…tell that to Stephen Hawkins.  My sports lessons were a combination of collective humiliation and patronising involvement.  I remember on one occasion playing football and received the usual token one pass during nearly an hour’s play and being in the last group of students to complete the weekly cross country run in the Spring term and being yelled at by the PE teacher for not trying.  I couldn’t see the point of it then and I still don’t…for me cross country is , to parody Wilde, a good walk ruined. 

Now I’m not knocking exercise and keeping fit, if only as a means of staving off ill-health though I do object to be lectured by the fascistic sports enthusiasts and health experts about what is best for me.  Surely I’m old enough to make decisions for myself.  I’m fed up with seeing sportsmen baring all when they lose (which they will inevitably will) as if they’ve let the country down…they simply didn’t win, get used to it.