The BBC sports department has a reputation for securing the flashiest commentary positions at all the major meetings in world sport.
Atmosphere is the Beeb's speciality, and when they show next summer's World Cup they will all but bring us to Japan and South Korea. When they beam in the last nine holes of the US Masters, they will invite us to smell the azaleas.
When the Beeb broadcast the World Snooker Championship, they can actually convince the viewer that he lives in Sheffield, which is a dangerous sort of art. They seem obliged to ensure we don't just watch an event, we live it.
So it was no surprise to see them taking pride of place at yesterday extravaganza at Park Lane, home of FA Cup assassins Canvey Island.
The Islandmen are the latest in the slew of midget-sized English soccer teams that leap into our collective conscious once a lifetime by dint of being FA Cup giant-killers. You thought romance was about Friday night Ryan Air flights to Paris and hastily ordered roses, but no, it is, in fact, all about watching overweight and unco-ordinated soccer players on BBC on a Sunday afternoon.
Canvey and their visitors, Northampton Town, managed to obtain yesterday's prime-time viewing slot by virtue of Canvey's elimination of Wigan in the previous round. Thus, BBC's redoubtable soccer analysts donned their Armani suits, brushed down the 'taches and headed off to Canvey, illustrating their whereabouts with a detailed map of the area, presumably for the benefit of Search and Rescue in case they got lost on the way home.
"Sunday afternoon on an island - it can't get any better," chuckled Alan Hansen in that macabre fashion of his. Neither Mark Lawrenson nor Ray Stubbs - who was the Ernest Shackleton of this particular expedition - saw the humour.
"This is what the FA Cup should be about every week," ventured Stubbs tentatively, and again there was silence.
The trio had arrived at a Blair Witch moment in broadcasting, and, judging by the position of their studio, they were in real, live danger. The BBC had, somehow, managed to position its team's luxury studio right on the end line of Canvey's quaint little ground, with a majestic view of not only the chuffed island folk but also their miserable little channel of water and a few industrial chimneys that puffed sagely in the distance.
By rough estimate, the BBC team was seated about 25 yards left of the goal, leaving the viewer to conclude that any stray shot would not only breach the BBC studio pane of glass but also possibly behead Stubbsy and canon right through his television. No need for virtual reality here.
Only the bravest soccer man could have sat through the next 90 minutes of fresh-air kicks and lunatic tackles, flying divots and Canvey Island singing without the need for several strong whiskeys.
Hansen looked positively pale by half-time, while Lawro wore his most lachrymose look, like the puppy abandoned two days after Christmas.
Part of the gloom was probably down to the fact that Lawro and Hansen knew that, given half an hour, they could champion a TV selection that would hammer the best of the combined opposition. With the former Liverpool pair at the heart and Lineker up front, it would simply be a matter of grabbing Jeremy Paxman, Laurence Llewelyn Bowen, Kilroy and maybe, at a push, Ally McCoist.
It is never hard to distinguish non-league sides from those above them. When Canvey played the ball on the ground, for instance, it was as if they were kicking the leather-
bound head of a hippopotamus, so heavy did it look. The centre-half winced every time he cleared - but then, so did the rest of us.
But once the ball went above shoulder height, it took on a trippy, helium-filled life of its own, hovering around the players' heads like one of those cartoon voice bubbles with no script.
At half-time the studio boys
were at a loss as to how to fill in the gaps. Needless to say, neither of the sorry teams could manufacture a goal and thus there was nothing to talk about.
"Eh, full of attitude and commitment," began Stubbsy, only to collapse, with his colleagues, into a fit of giddy laughter, as if they all at once realised that they had been the victims of an elaborate prank.
Maybe they did resort to the whiskey. But the cameras kept whirring and they recovered to offer the impossible: analysis.
They were quite taken, though, by the fate of Julian Dicks, once a Liverpool defender like themselves, but now manning the back of Canvey.
Dicks - or "The Terminator" as he prefers to be known - has, over the years, lost almost complete use of his right peg, and so he hobbled around the pitch, hamming it up like some Long John Silver in the Canvey Christmas panto. Hansen and Lawro were aghast. It's one thing for a former Liverpool man to visit Canvey, quite another to actually play there.
"I think that he is playing exceptionally well," declared Hansen, "for someone who cannot run." Only a great pro could say that line without laughing.
Canvey scored early in the second half, thereby gilding their giant-killing reputations, but commentator Trevor Brooking had clearly lost all motivation.
"I think Paul Gregory (the goal-scoring hero) looks a bit like the pop star Paul Young," he observed as the celebrations began. It was a thought that probably occurred to most viewers after about 10 minutes - even though Paul Young ceased to be a pop star about 20 years ago.
Northampton, inevitably, failed to recover from the Canvey curse and left the grim island defeated men.
By full-time, however, the BBC side had recovered much of their old gusto, but Alan Hansen did look a bit queasy as the locals gathered to bay and chant outside the studio. Maybe he has seen The Wicker Man.
Some day, months from now, Lawro and Hansen will be sitting down to analyse the World Cup semi-final and their day out in Canvey might well spring to mind. And they will, of course, shudder and think of how they might have ended up like Julian Dicks. That's romance for you.
