‘I want to watch football,’ my son announces as he arrives in from school. This is a surprise, to say the least. I love football, but lack the channels to watch many matches before his bedtime, so his experience of it in our house has been relatively meagre, and has provoked near perfect complacency within him in all that time. Now, he’s been turned on to the beautiful game by football-mad schoolfriends, who appear to be the kind of four-year olds who rank their weekend’s accumulators, and squabble over Gareth Southgate’s selections.
His interest is so low, in fact, that he’s previously had a hard time differentiating football from all other programming he dislikes, which he terms the ‘news’. The ‘news’ is anything that isn’t CBeebies, including The Crown, Bargain Hunt and any of the 8,000 Netflix series my wife watches featuring attractive teens with magic powers and inscrutably complex personal relationships.
