MILLIONS of TV viewers are up in arms, it seems, over the BBC being set to saturate them with sport.

For after gluing the nation to their sets with Euro 96 and Wimbledon, the Beeb now has more than 300 hours of the Olympics scheduled in the coming fortnight - with coverage of the already-under-way Open Golf and the England-Pakistan Test Match thrown in for good measure.

Understandably, many viewers are miffed at their favourite shows being ditched or postponed to make way for the deluge of summer sport.

Even marriage guidance experts are warning of a season of domestic discord as husband-and-wife rows over what to watch rage in living rooms all over the land.

Not everyone is a sports lover. But even those who are may find that the screening of some of the Olympics' more abstruse events - shooting, dressage, synchronised swimming and so on - is, well, just too much. But if that is not what most people would regard as compulsory viewing, it is perhaps as well to remember that none of this inundation of televised sport is either.

The fed-up viewers can, of course , swap channels - even though the choice of non-sports programme is bound to be limited.

Yet is there not an even better flip side to this issue?

For the schedules being soaked with sport will provide millions of people with the opportunity to discover what leisure was like before TV - if they will only stop being slaves to their sets and turn them off.

Waiting to be discovered these summer evenings are the joys of going for a walk, of stimulating conversation, of picking up a book and of a host of other pastimes and activities.

The sports-mad BBC could yet turn out to have done countless numbers of people a favour - in provoking them to rediscover themselves.

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