A fan's-eye view from Ewood Park, with Phil Lloyd

I'VE HAD this great idea.

I was thinking about the amount of decent sport on the BBC (very little) and the quality of its sitcoms (very poor). Why not, I thought, a sitcom about football?

I'd base it on a top flight football team that has fallen on hard times. Its star players have all moved on, going back to their roots, or the bright lights of the big city clubs. And things have gone sadly wrong.

At the start of the season, the manager is one of those comic stereotypes who regularly trips over his own ego (or raincoat) and pays amusingly inflated prices for incompetent players. Predictably, he gets the sack and for a time under new leadership, things improve.

But, in the zany world of TV sitcom, one thing's for sure - they won't improve for long!

It's hard to make football injuries funny, but this team has it down to an art form. Players pick up major injuries doing the most innocuous things and training games are always five-a-side because there isn't anyone else fit. Confusion reigns whenever they do get eleven players on the pitch and the team finds it helpful to get someone sent off to simplify tactics. The seemingly limitless patience of the supporters adds to the comic effect.

Encouraged by TV pundits saying their team will soon pull out of trouble, the fans keep urging them on only to be rewarded by their heroes finding increasingly laughable ways of managing to avoid victory. The slide towards relegation becomes inexorable yet, to the amusement of the viewers, the supporters keep hoping for a miracle!

The team's defending is a source of regular hilarity.

They periodically hit backpasses to the keeper that are harder than their shots at the opponents' goal. Or defenders collide with each other like circus clowns, presenting clear chances which opposing forwards gleefully accept.

The manager of this comic-cuts team responds to every slapstick performance by saying that he 'couldn't ask any more from the lads', which progressively drives the long-suffering fans to distraction. They wonder why he couldn't ask them to play for a full 90 minutes, or occasionally win a game.

I think the BBC will be impressed with my idea. Viewers up and down the country will roar with laughter.

Except maybe in Blackburn. Last Saturday's episode wasn't funny. Just deeply depressing.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.