My wife loves Home and Away. As spousal allegations go that’s not quite Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson, but there you go.
We all have our vices and Mrs Final Third’s is a fascination with a small fictitious place in Australia – Summer Bay that is, not David Warner’s brain.
Occasionally I get home in time to learn that a character has just found out they are pregnant.
FORTY AT 40: Top Ryan Giggs facts
If I don’t watch for two weeks they’ve had the baby. Miss a month and the kid’s about to move to ‘the city’.
It’s a show where the pace of change is high and plot twists appear increasingly implausible if you take your eye off the ball for a couple of weeks. It’s a lot like modern-day football.
Anyone who last tuned into our own real-life (well, sort of) soap opera in early September will be familiar with a story which finds Tottenham lauded for their transfer window acumen, Arsenal purring over the steal of the century that is Mesut Ozil, and Real Madrid fans slapping themselves on the forehead at the stupidity of selling such a key asset for £40million, and compounding the error by spending double that on a half-fit Gareth Bale.
Football’s casual observers will be as confused as a former Summer Bay resident visiting The Diner for the first time since 1997
Yet flick on again this week and the casual observer would be as confused as a former resident of Summer Bay pitching up in The Diner for the first time since 1997.
It’s a world where Spurs’ folly in the transfer window could cost Andre Villas-Boas his job, some Arsenal fans are wondering where the real Ozil has gone and Madrid are back-slapping furiously at the form of Bale and a host of other young summer imports.
And at the centre of it all stands Old Father Time himself, an ever-present for more than 20 years, a little thinner on top and lacking some zest but still able to steal the scene and influence events, whether with his own actions or some sage advice to a young colleague.
Without Ryan Giggs, like Summer Bay without Alf Stewart, we really would be lost.
TOP TEN: Things you won’t see during the Ashes
