Somehow, I’ve done my back in. I can hardly walk and moving is incredibly painful. I don’t know how this has happened, but I’m betting it had something to do with an ill advised drinking session on Wednesday (you should never get hammered on a school night). The reason I’m telling you this is because, after watching The Restaurant, the remote control was just out of reach and it hurt too much to fetch it. So on the same channel I stayed and ended up sitting through The Cup (BBC Two, Thursday, 18 September, 9.30pm). I braced myself for dross…

Watching The Cup last night was like going back to the ’70s, where people thought gays were funny, flaky and potential paedophiles. For some reason, I’d mistakenly thought that TV had moved on, but obviously not. Even though The Cup did it’s best to rectify this with a brief ramble from someone, it didn’t stop making the crap jokes about gays.

Get this. The manager of the under 11s team featured is, inexplicably, a French man. Now, in all my years of playing under 11s football, not once was I managed by someone who wasn’t a dad of one of the lads playing. This is itself is a huge oversight by this tawdry, shambolic show. In that seam alone, there’s a goldmine of gags. In my days, fistfights broke out over accusations of nepotism and in one fine moment, a mate of mine – from the pitch during a game – told our manager to “F*CK RIGHT OFF” after he was substituted in favour of the son who was having a nightmare.

Anyway, so this team find themselves with an eccentric foreign coach and he was seen going into a gay club, leaving the cast to make disparaging remarks about gay men in football. Apparently, they’re always changing their mind and they shouldn’t be allowed to hug young boys. At one point, when the manager was celebrating with his victorious team, one of the dad’s intercepted a hug because, well, he didn’t want ‘a gay’ hugging him… presumably in fear of the manager ‘grooming’ him or ‘turning’ the son. At the time of viewing, I was livid. In the cold light of day, the morning after, I’m furious. It won’t surprise you that this lazy show, with writing so thin that it makes tracing paper look like concrete, it made a joke about ‘playing for the other side’. Woeful.

Basically, when this show isn’t being offensive, it’s being irritating. When it isn’t being irritating, it’s scraping the barrel. When it’s not doing a combination of all three, it’s so bloody obvious and generic that you start furiously searching the internet to find the address of the person who commissioned this shite, so you can go round their house, demand and explaination and then, quite possibly, knock seven shades out of them. After seeing that Ben Elton/Alexa Chung show, I never thought I’d see a worse programme on telly… and guess what? The Cup trounces it. A horrible, pointless show.