Little can beat the thrill of settling down on the sofa to watch live sport, although over the years I have had TV sets that have done their absolute best to scupper it.
The first telly I remember from childhood was a sort of corrugated wooden box that my family didn’t even own – it was rented. This might make me sound as if I’m in my 90s, or grew up behind the iron curtain. But no, this was 1980s Birmingham, where my formative memory of both TV and sports was Poland’s 3-0 thrashing by England in the 1986 World Cup, requiring my dad to tell me what was happening because to a five-year-old it wasn’t especially obvious from said small wooden box what was actually going on.
