Why turn sport into Hollywood?

Can nothing stop the inexorable growth of food-related sexual perversion in this country?

Ever since that MP was found dead in women's clothing with an entire amylnitrate-laced fruit in his mouth, it's been well-nigh impossible to pop into my local greengrocer's for a pound of satsumas without the staff sniggering, and as for testing their melons for ripeness, I've had to give that up altogether.

Scarcely a month goes by without a news story about some vicar getting caught in flagrante delicto with a choirboy and some root vegetables, or a German gentleman inviting a friend over for an intimate meal (not to eat dinner but to be dinner), and recently on television, I saw the particularly revolting sight of Antony Worrall Thompson licking his own beaters.

Admittedly, that only sounds like a sexual perversion, but he licked the whisks on his food mixer so greedily that I for one felt violated. What a pity that nobody switched the machine on while he was doing it, because then he might have lost his tongue, and that would have been a blessing for us all.

It's not only food that leads people into temptation, because a serious and well-respected broadcaster once admitted to me that he'd had full penetrative sex with the 18th hole on St Andrews golf course.

Like many people, he obviously got turned on by the game (all that getting wood and thrashing about in a bit of rough, I suppose), which may explain the pre-orgasmic tone that pervaded yesterday's edition of Golf's Greatest Rounds on Sky Sports 3.

"The final round of the 2003 Players Championship will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the greatest ever," growled an American basso profundo whose testicles have clearly descended yards further than mine ever will, and the crowd at Sawgrass Florida groaned appreciatively, as though an unseen hand was trying to locate their erogenous zones and manipulate them to a collective climax.

However, we shouldn't forget that there is one major difference between a G-spot and a golf ball. Most men are prepared to spend as long as it takes when searching for a golf ball.

Having long regarded golf as a good walk spoiled, and objected to the likes of Grandstand wiping double bogeys across my screen, I was initially taken aback by the superior production values of this Sky Sports production.

Lavish cherry-picker shots, smooth tracking, inventive 3-D rostrum, opulent camerawork, and even Seal's Love Divine on the soundtrack made the programme feel less like workaday coverage of a year-old sporting event and more like a big-budget romantic Hollywood film.

However, that proved to be a Pyrrhic victory of sumptuous style over tedious content, because the programme's viewers were clearly either golfing fans (in which case they wouldn't have been seduced by the atmosphere, because they'd already have known that Davis Love III won by a mile), or they weren't, in which case they wouldn't have cared which of the deeply uncharismatic American competitors could get their ball into the hole in fewest strokes, or whether "Mother Nature is causing chaos today" by sending rain and hail to fall.

Talking of which, I wonder how people used to describe the size of hailstones in the days before golf balls were invented?