Why the soul no longer stirs to the Samba beat

For almost 50 years BBC’s Grandstand show defined Saturday afternoons in the UK and it came to do something similar here in Ireland for many of us once the signal for the British channels began to be picked up beyond the east coast.

Me, I never took to it all that much. In its latter years it leaned far too heavily on rugby league and such like. Football Focus and even Saint and Greavsie guaranteed more of a hit for us junkies whose exposure to footage of English football’s top flight was rationed according to a consensus among the power brokers at the time that you actually could have too much of a good thing.

On TV, anyway.