Channel 4′s new series, TV Heaven, Telly Hell (what a rubbish title!) features celebs slating and rating their favourite small screen moments. The show kicks off on Sunday March 26, with Alan Davies in the hot seat. In later weeks, Johnny Vaughan, David Mitchell, Bill Bailey, Johnny Vegas and Nick Hancock will all have a go. Of the former Big Breakfastanchor (I said, “anchor”) the programme’s host, Sean Lock, has said in interview …

“Johnny Vaughan is a very passionate man and he loves Jeff Stelling, you know, who does the results service on Sky Sports, because he’s got almost idiot savant levels of dealing with results and the implications of any game. Like Tranmere could draw with Lincoln City and he can work out the implications for about 14 different clubs, their relegation or play-off situation, in seconds. He has this unique mind, we call it.”

It’s been said that Soccer Saturday is the closest thing football has ever had to Test Match Special, weaving the scores and statistics with bonhomie and humour. Stelling has made the name of Kenny Deuchar, a prolific Scottish lower-league striker who combines his football career with his day job as a medic, branding him “the good doctor” and hailing Deuchar’s granny Mae, a confirmed Stelling fanatic.

Meanwhile, over on the BBC, Ray Stubbs makes a serious face, frowns, and says, “Garth, what’s your take on the events at Middlesbrough this week?”

Which brings us to Gary Lineker. Having attracted a horde of admirers in his new career as a football broadcaster, he now seems intent on losing them as fast as possible. As Hattenstone says, he’s become obsessed with tedious jokes (“Why the long face, Ruud?” – unfunny and unoriginal), tiresome wordplay (“Crouch comes off the couch to prove he’s no slouch” – what?) and smirking innuendo (“England has gone Bent!”).

The nadir came at the start of a recent Match Of the Day, featuring several matches from the Premiership relegation zone. Introducing his pundits, Lineker announced, “two men who know all about their bottom – of the table, that is – are Alan Hansen and Lee Dixon”.

The prospect of a month of all this during the World Cup isn’t exactly an enticing one.