TV View"Back on the Booze" read the monster headline on the Sky News video wall, in front of which Vivien Creegor stood, gravely telling the nation that George Best "has lost his battle with the bottle".

It's at times like this that you almost begin to understand the madness of celebrity, a land where a palpable need for "respect for privacy at a difficult time" is taken as an invitation to pry some more.

Mind you, all belonging to Best appeared to spend the past two days briefing the press on his progress, or lack of it, with not a huge amount of respect for his dignity, leading to an inescapable conclusion: with nearest and dearest like that, who needs intrusive reporters?

Best, of course, hardly helps himself by exhibiting his weaknesses in public, but that's the point: Best can't help himself.

Soon after he was arrested on Saturday evening for his part in a scuffle in The Chequers bar in Surrey, Sky despatched their man to monitor the pub's movements, live. He was still there yesterday afternoon. Live.

"We'll take you live to the pub where the former Man U great has been enjoying his Sunday," Creegor promised us. She was as good as her word - after the break we were whisked back to The Chequers, where Jonathan Samuels was posted, live.

Not so exclusive, though. By now The Chequers' car park was heaving with satellite dishes waiting to capture the moment Best would be thrown out of the pub for eating a granny. They waited. And waited. And waited. To no avail.

"How is George," pub customer Jill Anson was asked when she emerged from The Chequers. Mineral water was mentioned. Disappointing.

"He was fine," she said.

"When you say 'fine' . . . ," asked the deflated reporter, who appeared to be prompting Anson to redefine "fine" as "disorderly, unruly, offensive, rowdy, disruptive and inebriated".

"He was George Best, he wasn't aggressive, he was pleasant," she insisted.

"That's tragic," the reporters thought to themselves.

Earlier, Sky had reminded us that Best's liver transplant had been paid for by the NHS, at which point we were, presumably, to conclude that the NHS should pay a visit to The Chequers and ask for their liver back. Were we also meant to conclude that George Best chose to be an alcoholic and is enthusiastically drinking himself to death? Ah lads. Go home. Leave the man in peace.

Uncannily enough, all of this happened just two days after Channel Four aired Inside the Mind of Paul Gascoigne, a place to which even Captain Kirk would resist boldly going.

Many have placed Gascoigne in the same "troubled footballing genius" category as Best, but, surely, it's time for the Trades Description Act to analyse this definition of "footballing genius". Gascoigne at his best? Great. Best at his best? Divine.

What they do have in common, however, is an acute need for friends to act like friends, and not vultures happy to appear on crass television documentaries, laddishly chortling about the mad things they used to do, and then expressing sorrow at their descent in to despair.

Did Bryan Robson really need to reveal that Gascoigne contemplated suicide on a train platform on the way to Middlesbrough? Did Paul Merson, who should know better, really need to divulge Gascoigne's worst excesses during his England days?

"He hated talking about football," said John Barnes, "if you ever asked him a question he'd put his fingers in his ears and go 'blaaaaaaaa'."

Tony Dorigo then recalled the moment Gascoigne farted during a "very, very serious" England team talk by Bobby Robson. Gascoigne would do well to go "blaaaaaaaa" and fart in response to documentaries like Inside the Mind of Paul Gascoigne.

Inside the mind of Tyrone supporters? "You'd have thought there was a fatwah out on me," said Joe Brolly of his brush with Canavan's Red and White Army, after criticising Tyrone on RTÉ this summer. "There is," said Colm O'Rourke, comfortingly.

"Hell hath no fury like an Ulster football supporter," warned Brolly, just after O'Rourke had previewed the Ulster final between Tyrone and Down: "If it's a good game it'll be the first and I'll believe it when I see it - the Ulster championship has been pitiful this year."

Seventy minutes later? O'Rourke had his hands up: "I'm glad to be able to say something nice about an Ulster final: it was a very entertaining game."

And there was high praise, too, for Down's Benny Coulter. "He has a left foot in the right place," said O'Rourke. No wonder the Tyrone defence looked befuddled when he broke through to score that goal.