Why we should put a cordon around football to keep the “slebs” out

DEPRESSING news has reached me this week. The BBC are to hire comedian James Corden to provide an alternative – and no doubt ‘edgy’ – analysis after every England game in this summer’s World Cup.

The grim import of this may not be apparent to some Irish readers who may be unfamiliar with the full oeuvre of Corden’s work, or who may calculate, quite reasonably, that the standard of BBC’s soccer coverage which pairs blind, unquestioning, patriotism with the oleaginous Gary Lineker and the monosyllabic Alan Shearer, could not get very much worse. But they would be sadly wrong.

For the uninitiated, James Kimberly Corden played Tims, the tubby one, in Alan Bennett’s beautifully observed narrative of provincial English education, The History Boys, which was thunderously acclaimed at the National Theatre and on Broadway, and was a rare example of a stage play migrating successfully to the cinema.