Rarely has a TV programme received so much hype and attention. The BBC
Panorama programme on transfers and bungs was moved from Sunday evening to the prestigious PM slot in the UK two days later, thus attracting a mass audience. We were promised all sorts of revelations, new evidence, big names named - the Full Monty of investigative journalism. This was surely going to be the lads' answer to a double episode of Desperate Housewives, only this time even the missus was interested enough to get on the starting grid.

After half an hour I'd had enough, to the extent that I volunteered to do the washing up (even though it wasn't my turn). As a football fan of 45 years' experience, you can imagine my surprise that the programme exposed the following startling revelations:

That football agents are not the most scrupulous and honest representatives of the human race;

That football managers might be prepared to sign a player in return for receiving rectangular pieces of paper with pictures of the Queen on the front;

That some people in the higher echelons of football actually know that this may be going on;

That a sting by the programme to induce agents and managers to say they like
the idea of receiving money actually got them to say such things.

Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather.

Poor Sam Allardyce and his equally-rich agent son Craig were left out to dry by the producers as other big names who could well have been on the roster of bung recipients were miraculously left without a mention.

He may not be the brightest lamp on the street but after a playing career conspicuous by its mediocrity, Big Sam has proved himself at the highest level with shrewd buys and tactical acumen to take unfashionable Bolton into Europe.

For me, the programme reinforced my theory that the United Kingdom is run by a bunch of middle-class liberals from the chattering classes and BBC who all live within one square mile of Islington, north London. For all the money in the game, football is still played and watched by working-class people. The fact they don't wear cloth caps and eat dripping sandwiches as they did in the 1950s, and instead aspire to a better way of life in the 21st century, does not negate the fact that England's national game is working-class theatre (which is what draws millions of us to it week after week).

So what better target for the BBC intelligentsia than the likes of Big Sam and Harry Redknapp, working-class people through and through, whose parents and grandparents probably had to work seven days a week down a mine or on a dockside so that their kids could eke a living out of football and benefit from a better way of life.

Here's a better use of our money - and it is OUR money that pays these BBC 'investigative journalists'. How about a programme made by some budding film makers from council estates of Bolton exposing how the BBC hierarchy is made up almost entirely of middle-class Oxbridge graduates, how £800,000 per year of OUR money gets into the grubby hands of morons, aka 'disc jockeys' who fill the airwaves with the new vocabulary of 'innit' and 'cool'. Or maybe we could have a programme about the creativity of planning meetings of the Panorama team - you can almost feel the salivation as they come up with a ruse to confine the national pastime of the working-class to the dustbin.

At the end of the day, to quote every manager in the country, the people who will make the most in bungs (the middle-class variety), are those wretched lawyers for both sides who will be able to enjoy a glass of bubbly or two with their old Oxbridge comrades now working at the BBC, feeding them yet more fodder. After watching the programme, the words of a Leyton Orient fan after the 1-0 defeat at home to Swansea two weeks ago reverberated in my ear: "Now I know how the wife feels when she's got her monthly."