TV View:It's now eight years since the Frenchman Jean Van de Velde went for a paddle in a Scottish ditch and the "shock" is still reverberating through the world of golf. So much so that Wednesday night's preview of the Open (BBC 2) was hung on it.
Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson and all the star names might have been safely tucked up awaiting the off, but the hook to catch the viewers was film of a polo shirt from another millennium hacking at water. And therein lies the televisual challenge of making golf watchable.
Gary Lineker and Hazel Irvine introduced the pictures from 1999 with the sombre distaste that suggested we were about to see the Archbishop of Canterbury in a shift.
And for some, Van de Velde's "meltdown" when blowing a lead at the last Open to be held at Carnoustie might indeed emit a slight cough and study the wall.
For those of you wondering what a golfing "meltdown" is, our ami Jean struck a ball into a stream called the Barry Burn and in attempting to play out triggered widespread horror by removing shoes and socks.
Lineker's tone suggested Jean should have had the decency to disappear into a desert, grow a beard and spend the rest of his life beating his poitrine.
Except Jean wasn't playing ball. He calmly explained he couldn't be at Carnoustie this year because of a virus, and for a man who should have been on the verge of several nervous breakdowns he appeared quite sane, despite the doom-laden Wagnerian soundtrack.
"Do I spend all my time regretting that?" he asked rhetorically. "I've just been to hospital and to see some of the people in front of me puts things in context."
Which is just the sort of unhelpful input the Beeb director could have done without. When a sport's "edge" is provided by someone so "colourful" as Ian "aren't my pants pink" Poulter, a maddeningly level-headed Frenchman is not what you need. What was really required was Jean going all Zizou and planting one on the interviewer while screaming dementedly for death.
But that's the French for you - unco-operative. Only last year, a BBC feature on France's greatest racehorse trainer, André Fabre, billed him as racing's very own Napoleon. Except Fabre then went out of his way to say Boney was a disaster and Wellington was the man he really admired.
At least then, however, the director could cut to multi-coloured footage of thoroughbreds in full flight, always a better option than showing Colin Montgomerie.
"It's surprising how you don't need 100 per cent of your game," surmised the real le crank. "If I can play to 80 or 85 per cent of my entire game, I'll be on the leaderboard."
Even a cursory glance at the telly over the following four days indicated Monty was well short of his percentage.
So the director indulged in some long-lens atmospherics that showed us wide-angle views of grey seas, dark skies and interminable drizzle. It could have been depressing. But there was a curious symmetry to it; we had started with water and it was water we kept returning to.
A welcome escape from golf came on Saturday, courtesy of the All-Ireland football quarter-finals from Portlaoise.
O'Moore Park will never be mistaken for Caesar's Palace, but after a couple of days of golf, the sight of people breaking out of a walk was blessed relief.
It even seemed to encourage the RTÉ panel to break into a trot, unlike Peter Alliss and friends, who leave the sort of dead air that suggests they've gone off to boil a kettle.
A new and impressive addition to the RTÉ team is the former Kerry footballer Dara Ó Cinnéide.
The All-Ireland-winning captain was a stylish performer on the pitch and is blessed with an understated fluency that contrasts nicely with the attention-seeking gurning of some of his colleagues.
It probably won't harm his career prospects that there's also something for the ladies - nice eyes, apparently, according to Mrs O'Connor.
It was not, however, a suave Kerryman, but a hard-talking Corkman that was required at half-time in the Cork-Louth game - Louth were leading, and Dara and his colleague Tony Davis speculated on the nature of Billy Morgan's pep-talk.
"It's time to roll up their sleeves and get their nails dirty," hissed Tony, sounding as if he'd like to scratch some eyes out.
At least it provided a frisson.
Back at the golf, the Spaniard Sergio Garcia wiggled over a ball before hitting it.
"Look at that!" squeaked Mark James at the slow-motion replay. "The touch of a surgeon."
No doubt that will be the preview footage in 2015 - Sergio and his amazing stationary ball.
