Strange happenings on BBX are no fluke or lungworm

TV View: A couple of months back young Jermain Defoe paid tribute to Paolo di Canio by declaring, "He must be 35 now, but he's still going strong," while Nobby Solano noted that it was difficult for 33-year-old Alan Shearer to be "jumping, jumping and jumping, especially at his age".

Now, any self-respecting 30-something-year-olds would have given Jermain and Nobby a good clip round the ear for coming out with such talk, but they'd only have put their backs out trying to catch them.

And 30-something-year-olds would have put their eyeballs out trying to prove they were with-it, happening, trendy hipsters by tuning in to Network Two's Breaking Ball Xtra (BBX) last Thursday.

This is the latest acid test of age, one that lets you know precisely how untrendy and obsolete you are: if the camera technique on BBX makes you feel green about the gills and leaves your swirling eyes incapable of focusing on one object for longer than half a second then you're very probably past it.

"It's GAA, but not as you know it," warned presenter Maireád Ní Ghormáin, and, d'you know, she was right. "Good God almighty," we could almost hear Archbishop Croke saying in the heavens above.

BBX, we should explain, is an offshoot of Breaking Ball, a programme that wears its baseball cap backwards and says things like "we'll deliver a fresh fix of GAA to the power of X" and "Galway and Tyrone couldn't be separated on an electrifying first date". Bowsies.

It's Snoop Doggy Dog meets Cumann Lúthchleas Gael and is aimed at youngsters who think hurling is slow because they've been reared on MTV, where no one image remains on the screen for longer than a blink. The cameras do so much whizzing about the place they make Henry Shefflin seem stationary-like on an average Sunday.

If the Sun's Alan Milton doesn't win Most Unflappable GAA Pundit of 2004 it'll be a travesty. While he chatted to Maireád about the weekend's big games the camera hurtled towards his face at the speed of sound, then swerved to the left, narrowly avoiding a collision with his nose, soared upwards, dive-bombed past Maireád's right eyebrow and then did a backwards-double-twisting-front-somersault before resting its focus on Alan's left shin. If you wondered what happened Red Arrows pilots when they retire, well, they operate BBX cameras.

That's not all. The highlights from the previous Sunday's games are done in a stoppy-starty music video kind of way. "Beautiful skill by the big man, big man, big man," said Marty Morrissey, who has been transformed into MC Maarti by BBX's sound-editing people.

And when Eamon Sweeney appeared and treated us to a gem of a piece on Three Kisses, the 1955 Oscar-winning short film about hurling ("it's a kind of Lady Chatterley's Hurler") he was sitting in an armchair in a field. Is it just us, or is life now one big unfathomable mystery? What's with the armchair in the field?

Market research time: Hello young person, what did you think of the show? "Stoked, big up BBX - majestik, phat, MC Maarti's wazzo." In English, sort of: BBX is tremendous.

We can pine all we like but the days when we'd turn on our tellies to be told "Bobby Ryan, Tipperary hurler and farmer, recommends Zerofen, the new all-round wormer for cattle" are gone. Breaking Ball, BBX's Big Brother, confirmed as much.

Before showing us a piece on the filming of a spectacular new ad featuring the GAA's finest, they took on a nostalgia trip, back to the days when players "only advertised cures for mastitis and liver fluke".

And people wondered why city slicker youngsters followed Derby instead of Dublin. Joe Cooney plugged a product that would "control roundworms, lungworms, mature and immature liver fluke in cattle and sheep", an ad that always had Jackeens wondering if immature liver fluke were the lads who still giggled at jokes about girls.

We have, then, moved on as the battle to redirect Irish youngsters' attention from English football to GAA gathers pace. The signs are encouraging, based on the evidence of the Sky News coverage of Arsenal's victory parade in North London. "Some of those fans have travelled phenomenal distances to be there," Juliette Foster said to reporter Mark White. "Yes," said Mark, thrusting his microphone into a fan's face ("If he's from Manorhamilton I'll weep," said Archbishop Croke).

"Where have you come from?" asked Mark. "I live just round the corner, mate." Phew. "Ah sure," the Archbishop might say, if he has a think about it, "if BBX does the trick with happening Irish youngsters, then - majestik, phat, wazzo."