DavieCooper.com Editor’s Blog

Swirling through the radio waves, cajoling, bruising, titillating, sweeping up through the valleys of Glenmore and down the streets of Glasgae…it greets us. Saturday lunchtimes, Off the Ball – the white dog turd of Scottish radio.

It is without doubt an endangered species; the thinking man’s football show. Effortlessly blending schoolboy jokes about dobers and fuds with philosophical musings on life. It races up and down the ladder of abstraction like a window cleaner with the skitters.

Stuart Cosgrove, the epitome of the liberal thinking Guardian reader, is the shows pedagogue. The definition of modern Scot – combining tales of single ends in Perth with lectures on Marcel Proust. Tam Cowan, his blue-collar foil; coarse, sharp, witty – the guy that makes you howl in the pub x1000.  It’s an over-simplification to say Cosgrove provides sustenance for the mind and Cowan tickles your funny bone, but that’s where their strengths lie. They’re both intelligent, funny guys.

The shows appeal is universal. Some of the football references may body-swerve the unenlightened, but Cowan’s carpet bombing delivery will have you grinning every 55 seconds (every 54 seconds a man thinks about sex). That leaves another 58 seconds for thinking about beer.

So next time, instead of surfing for porn, wrest your wrist, expand your mind and tune into Off the Ball. The Woody Allen of Football Shows (the early funny one that mixed Marx Brothers with Bergman, not the lurid pensioner):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/scotland/tv_and_radio/7133168.stm

This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 11:03 am and is filed under Editor's blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.