Kiddies having porridge with smash-face wrestling on top

TV View: Isn't it interesting how some of the shows that are shown at weekends before 8am should be X-rated?

TV View: Isn't it interesting how some of the shows that are shown at weekends before 8am should be X-rated?

Catch up, will you? That's the time kids get up on a Sunday morning and go down to turn on the television.

They spill the milk and sugar over the table and the cornflakes on the carpet. The spoons are shoved into the video player.

Parental guidance? It's simply a case of turn on the telly, kids, and give your parents another 30 minutes in bed.

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They, after all, will have the thought flashing through their heads that they really shouldn't have ordered a third round of flaming sambucas.

First impressions are that World Wrestling Entertainment Afterburn is not ASP Pro Surf Tour.

Both programmes come into the household at unfeasibly early hours on a Sunday, with the slugfest found on Sky Sports 3 and the surfers coming in from the Extreme Sports Channel.

The sneaking suspicion is the wrestling is actually never off the television. Being a bit of a late-night channel surfer, I have evidence that wrestling has infiltrated, like a virus, all zillion networks you get with NTL.

The wrestling, which someone has informed me has now been classed as entertainment and not sport but nonetheless is still being broadcast on a dedicated sports channel, is fascinating for all the wrong reasons.

Yesterday a chap from Blackpool, Mr Regal, was fighting an Irishman named Mr Finley for the US Championship.

On the surfing channel you get funky music with skinny kids peeling through, over, and on top of giant waves.

On Afterburn, you have two commentators screaming constantly, occasionally at the same time and always loud, so very, very loud.

When they are not shouting, they play heavy-metal music, where the lead singers are either castratos or singing from their bowels. The fans are also very, very loud and the audience is, shockingly, full of adults.

You have to assume that it's the same syndrome that brings dads to Girls Aloud and Atomic Kitten concerts - simply to provide parental guardianship their young daughters, of course. Nothing to do with middle-aged men leering at 20-year-old pop singers showing lots.

"He's not a troll. He's a leprechaun," screamed one of the Afterburn mic-jockeys, as a tiny man in a green outfit with a shillelagh danced threateningly around the ring before shuffling through the ropes.

"He's trying to rearrange the facial features of Regal. The British man won't be happy. You watch a bar fight between these two and that's what you get in the ring," shouted the other voice.

"Did you see that kick to the head?" screamed the first voice.

"I saw it right there. Holy Cow! This is smash-face wrestling."

"This is not wrestling, it's simply effective. Finley drives his knee. Oh, did you see that? He drove his knee right into Regal's temple," screams the other voice.

At that moment Regal is standing up and jumping in the air, using the windpipe of a prostrate Finley to break his fall. It's a hopeless situation. Finley is going to lose his US Championship belt. But wait.

"Here's the leprechaun, the troll. He has the shillelagh. He's shaking it at Regal," they scream together.

Magically, Finley recovers in jig time to turn the tables, eventually leaving the beaten English entertainer to slap the canvas in frustration.

In the Motor City Smackdown, King Booker has his "chick" with him. The "chick" is dressed in a gold evening dress with a slit up to her hips. She is exhorting the crowd to bow down in front of King Booker.

Booker's breasts are fully formed and large.

Hers are of cartoon proportions but strangely appropriate for this oversized slapstick knockabout.

Kelly comes into the ring, and afterwards King Booker.

Her man, who succeeded a bloke with VIOLENCE stamped across his gumshield, is mildly rebuking her.

"Kelly, you can never take your clothes off in public again," he gently tells her.

Kelly is like the pop singer Britney Spears, whom the English writer and journalist Will Self once described as "a corn-fed mid-American doll with no talent and no personality".

Still, The Sandman had mistakenly poleaxed poor Kelly with a piece of stadium furniture last time the two had met. Would it happen again?

Cutting from the wrestling to the surfing, you are reminded of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) the hawkish, lunatic, US army commander in the film Apocalypse Now.

Obsessed with surfing, Kilgore breaks away from destroying a Vietnam village to meet top surfer Lance Johnson and congratulate him on his ability to nose-ride and cut back.

"It's an honour to meet you, Lance . . . None of us are anywhere near your class, though . . . We do a lot of surfing around here, Lance," continues Kilgore as pieces of exploding bodies fly all around them.

This is what early-morning television does to you. It's just got to be harmful.

Johnny Watterson

Johnny Watterson

Johnny Watterson is a sports writer with The Irish Times