Pot Music Marathons Don't Need Jazzing Up

The snooker has been interesting, hasn't it? Ha, ha, only joking. I am not saying I am not enjoying the coverage of the World Championship , just that in the early stages it tends to be not so much compelling sporting drama, more a highly effective way of killing an afternoon. In fact, in the words of the 1980s pop muppet Owen Paul's only chart hit, my favourite waste of time.

See, title and artiste. That is the kind of detail you want when a popular music reference arises. I am becoming increasingly irritated by sports programmes using a vocal track in a montage and failing to tell you what the heck it is. Is this the beginning of a campaign?

If there is a child in the house when it happens, I can usually get the information I want, although I suspect they sometimes shout out "Fratellis" or "Klaxons" just to keep me quiet. (Jo Whiley on Radio One often neglects to give details of the records she plays as well but that is a separate issue.) Only Sky's Soccer AM is good enough to provide a caption over its goals compilations to help those of us whose grip on popular culture loosened around the time Gary Glitter was still considered an all-round family entertainer.

Anyway the snooker on BBC2 (yes, the snooker. Sorry, I drifted off , but what do you expect, I have been watching the snooker) prefaced the match between John Parrott and Shaun Murphy with footage of the two players on their way to The Crucible, to a backing of Run Wild by New Order (thanks kids), part of the BBC's attempt, I suppose, to make the World Championship a little sexier.

In this I think the BBC is missing the whole point of snooker. We do not need it to be more interesting. We are actually perfectly capable of spending seven hours in front of the TV in an afternoon (Is it seven hours? It is something like that) watching two young chaps we have never heard of knocking coloured balls into pockets. It is what separates us from the animals.

The very dullness of snooker is the perfect accompaniment, I find, to an indolent afternoon. The clack, clack of the balls, the comforting voices of the ex-players in the commentary box, mellowed by smoky snooker halls and a lifetime of not getting too excited, the safety shots, the endless close-ups of one player slumped in his seat showing no emotion as the other cleans up the frame, showing no emotion. So satisfyingly unlike Jose Mourinho.

But about the music: who decided the lyrics need not be relevant any more? We knew where we were when the only tunes used in sports shows were Simply The Best and We Are The Champions, but that New Order song included a lyric about Jesus which did not seem entirely germane to the best of 25 frames and, as Parrott and Murphy's cars approached The Crucible, the words, "Dusty roads to distant places. . ."

Exactly how dusty are the roads in Sheffield and is the council doing anything about it? Sheffield, that is, easily accessible from junction 34 of the M1; hardly distant.

And if New Order's song seems to belong elsewhere, how about this year's wacky title sequence, which I am able to deconstruct for you only because of the time I spent in the 1970s in the old Academy Cinema in Oxford Street watching art-house movies?

It starts with a close-up of the cue being thrust forward (phallic symbol?) coming into contact with the perfectly round shiny surface of the cue ball (I am seeing a well-rounded buttock here, but that could be the result of too much Buñuel in my formative years). Just for a micro-second - it is almost subliminal - this mixes into an image of a big, spooky, soulful horse's eye (we are all familiar with Equus, further comment unnecessary), and then the horns of a bull, which somehow lock together to form a single horn, at which the horse rears up. A shot of a snorting bull's nose with a ring through it is followed by the white horse galloping through a ring of snooker balls trailing wisps of blue smoke. We then see a pair of gloved hands polishing a ball, before the pièce de résistance: the same white-gloved hands apparently massaging the flanks of a horse, conjuring up definite echoes of Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour. I could not say what happened next, because I went for a cold shower.

Fortunately the presenter Hazel Irvine seems the kind of sensible gal to bring a chap down to earth and she is doing a bang-up job on the snooker, helped by as fine a selection of good eggs as any sport could muster: the genial Parrott, fast-talking Willie Thorne as the man-most-likely-to-be-mistaken- for-Mr-Potato-Head and Steve Davis, who gets better with every tournament and is now an official National Treasure.

His style, of course, is to send himself up rotten. In a celebrity challenge match with Sam Torrance, for instance, he allows the golfer to win; just one of many bits of business with which the afternoons are studded, because the BBC, I suspect, feels it has to dress its baby up in pretty clothes to disguise the fact that it is actually a rather dull baby. But hey, on behalf of timewasters everywhere, let me say we like it that way.