Bbc Snooker: Padding, Guff and a Detestable Dragon

Sports, like those who watch them, have bloated over the past decade. Now that up-to-the-minute technology, rather than the whim of the referee, determines the amount of injury time played in both halves, football matches are five per cent longer. Test matches can go on for the full 450 overs. Horse-race festivals add an extra day and still they come.

Snooker, as ever, bucks the trend. The stout days of Eddie Charlton and Doug Mountjoy starting a session at 10am and having to leave it 'to be continued' at 6pm with Charlton edging it 3-3, 43-28, have long gone. Snooker has become a slim-line game played mostly by stick-thin youths capable of travelling at eight frames an hour.

That's to be welcomed - we all have lives to lead - but it's proved to be a headache for the BBC. When they cover a snooker tournament it stays covered: 1.30pm-6pm; 7pm-9pm; 11.15pm-12.15am. That's a typical snooker day. Early on, with two tables operating, the BBC can just about pad their way through such an exhaustive schedule. But when the ply-board curtain comes down to signify the semi-final stages time lies very heavy.

Inevitably, they've filled the hole with celebrity. Sir Matthew Pinsent, 'the Big Etonian', who's clearly being groomed - if you can still use that word in these paedo-crazy days - to play a significant part in 2012, showed up for some chat. Less explicably, so did Duncan Bannatyne from Dragons' Den. It's entirely typical of the BBC that, having found themselves with an unexpected hit on their hands, they misascribe the reasons for its success. No one watches Dragons' Den to listen to the detestable Dragons; everyone watches in the hope that a canny punter will sell them a pup. Any fool can make a fortune from health clubs (Bannatyne), holiday parks (Meaden) or mobile phones (Jones), but to amass one from a glove that reminds you which side of the road to drive on when abroad takes application and inspiration. The fact that Bannatyne laughed at the putative glove magnate proves him to be a petty man of limited ambition.

Equally worrying was John Parrott's answer to 'which three snooker players would you invite to dinner?' This hoary question had been answered properly and correctly by Steve Davis, who's far too good to be restricted to snooker, with 'Terry Griffiths, Cliff Thorburn, Joe Davis.' Parrott, in contrast, went with 'Willie Thorne, Dennis Taylor and JV.' That's to say a manic, bald gambler; a man who's never unfunnier than when wearing his comedy glasses, and Jim Davidson's sidekick. A ghastly trinity, and calling John Virgo 'JV' is as shrivelling as praising Jesus Christ as 'JC'.

But even JP's invitation to his three fellow commentators wasn't the most blatant piece of crawling among the padding. That accolade fell to Hazel Irvine, who, while being impossible to dislike, has a broadcasting style that encourages rather than averts the postprandial power nap. She rounded off a plug by saying: 'And all our best wishes go out to everyone involved in the production.' I woke with a start. What's she talking about? Rally Iraq? An unsupervised moon landing? No, Inside Sport, the BBC's new sport magazine programme, which was fine - but with three people sitting around in a studio talking about John Terry, it might not be the most dangerous programme ever produced.