Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Thursday 26 June 2003

26 June 2003

Town's official website is at it again with those cheeky headlines. All Change In The Grimsby Town Boardroom, it teases, the story turning out to be the building work going on at Blundell Park that will see the directors decamp to the former lottery office because the current boardroom is to become the matchday sponsors' secret den. Extra kiosks and bars are also being provided. "We are providing better facilities and we want people to come and support the club," says Town's indefatigable commercial manager Tony Richardson, though the Diary suspects it will take more than a microwaved pie to attract Grimsby's tens of thousands of miserable bastards who never watch football and still think the Mariners are always bottom of Division Four.

You know those crowds of people who stand around cheering with banners and things when somebody gets evicted from Big Brother? I just was saying the other day how they can't be real people and Channel 4 must pay them, because surely nobody is so devoid of a life as to do that by choice and without remuneration. Yeah, I know, pots and kettles. Mrs Diary initially agreed - until discovering that the Big Brother house is in Borehamwood, where she knows from bitter experience that there really is nothing better to do. Anyway, Steph Coldicott's inoffensiveness strategy, whereby she seeks to avoid eviction by never saying anything to anybody ever in case they don't like it, has backfired, as Wife of Stace is one of the inmates nominated for removal in the next vote. Apparently. I guess somebody just didn't like her face. Not the Diary's kid brother, though, who has posited the interesting hypothesis that Mrs Coldicott is in fact a babe.

"I remember the last time we played Donny very well," writes Sam Metcalf in an email to the Diary. I bet we didn't always play Donny very well though. "Keith Alexander scored an absolute screamer from the corner of the 18-yard box - I personally think it was a poor touch as he always used to head for the byline before realising where the goal was, but there you go. Also, I'm pretty sure the game was refereed by a certain Uriah Rennie." Well well.

Seeing as there isn't much news right now, and the All England Lawn Tennis Championships are proceeding apace, the Diary has decided to run a daily series entitled Reasons I Hate Wimbledon. Today, then, number 1 in the series: rubbish reporting. For there is something about Wimbledon fortnight that compels the BBC to jettison the quality threshold that generally applies to its sports journalism. How else could it be, reader, that the Beeb can see fit to give airtime to a sports psychologist analysing Mr Rusedski's entertaining stream of profanity with the dazzling insight that "Greg lost control of his emotions out there"? If I had a TV licence then I would have ripped it up in disgust.