Sport on TV: Getting horny. Getting fat. Your choice for life after sport
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Your support makes all the difference.There are many and varied ways to head off into sporting retirement. The preferred exit for tennis players is, of course, face down in a mound of coke like Al Pacino in Scarface, but failing that you can always let your career dribble away, (allegedly) cheat on your girlfriend with Paris Hilton and end up on reality TV.
That's the route favoured by Mark Philippoussis, the lucky feller whose job is to pick a squeeze from a bevy of luscious lovelies in Age Of Love (E4, Wednesday). The USP is that they're in their forties, which for a man who's never dated an older woman – "I'm not used to talking about kids on dates" – came as a horrible shock. As each told him her age, his sprayed-on smile began to freeze over, and when the last one owned up to 48, one of his jaw muscles twanged like Norman Bates' in Psycho.
Fair play, though: as he got to know them, he allowed their mature charms to smooth away his prejudices. "This has been good for me," he said. "The age thing? It's a number."
Then at the end of the first programme there was another twist: a curtain fell to reveal a posse of glamourpusses, all in their twenties. His smile lit up the night sky, distracting pilots. Suddenly he was less Mark Philippoussis, more Leslie Philippoussis. It looks like the oldies climbed the hill only to discover that they're over it.
Or you can do post-retirement reality TV the Oliver Skeete way. Now a fighting-fit 50, the former showjumper went on Binge Britain (Five, Wednesday) – not a rehash of the Paul Gascoigne story, but a Morgan Spurlock rip-off.
The former showjumper, still a fine figure of a man, had to eat a pound of cheese a day for a fortnight – like scooping up a fistful of fat every day and ramming it down your throat – while taking no exercise.
Lo and behold, he developed bad breath, disturbed sleep patterns and mood swings, put two inches on his waist and lost a fifth of his lung capacity. "I've got boils on my arse, I've got spots on my back, I've got creaky knees and sweaty palms," he told the boffins. "And I've been blowing-off quite a lot."
Skeete or Philippoussis? Who would you rather be?
Finally... I was disturbed to discover how much I know about Chelsea when an advertising executive was answering questions about them on Mastermind (BBC 2, Monday). They beat Real Madrid in the Cup -Winners' Cup final replay in Piraeus; it was Chris Sutton who went goalless all those games; Nigel Spackman arrived the second time from Rangers... All that useless knowledge: deeply worrying.
The ad exec lost in the end on passes. There'll be more of that on the pitch, you'd like to think, now that Chelsea's mastermind has gone.
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