TV VIEW:AN UNCOMFORTABLE sporting weekend, not least for the Irish Winter Olympics team who were sandwiched between Iran and Israel in the opening ceremony in Vancouver. Still, it was a less perilous place to be, as it proved, than between the teeth of the French in Paris.

It was, possibly, the former Borussia Monchengladbach full-back Freddy Nietzsche who once said, “Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man”. George Hook, evidently, is a disciple of Freddy, because come show-time he was preaching that thesis: all talk of victory in Paris was foolish, hope-raising claptrap.

Brent Pope and Conor O’Shea protested that this was excessively gloomy.

Tom McGurk: “So, who are you going for?”

Brent: “France.”

Conor: “France.”

“The masters of doom,” said Ryle Nugent.

Keith Wood wasn’t a whole lot more optimistic over on the BBC, where Gabby Logan had opened the coverage with a little film reminding us, lest we’d forgotten, of that handball.

“And I am standing on the very spot where Thierry Henry did the deed,” she said, which left us hoping that Roy and Triggs weren’t watching on their couch back in Ipswich. “Ah – Get over it,” Triggs would have barked, before fetching the lead to take Roy for a walk.

Keith, looking for all the world like Benjy from The Riordans – “I don’t wear this hat all the time,” he promised us – appeared marginally more frostbitten than Ryle, who, Tom told us, was “as warm as a fishfinger”.

“There is cold and there is cold, this is beyond that again,” Tony Ward shivered. The first half failed to warm the cockles of his frozen heart, so to speak.

The temperatures really only rose when Jerry Flannery nigh on drop-kicked Alexis Palisson through the goal-posts of life, but despite trailing 17-3 at half-time there was divil a sign of a white flag in Tom’s paw.

“This game is not over yet, it’s on the edge,” he declared.

This prompted a broadcasting moment as historic as the Moon Landing: Conor and Brent agreed with George.

“You said this game is on the edge! It’s on the edge of an abyss,” said the Hook man.

“France are on the edge of cutting loose, Tom – George is right,” said Conor.

So, what were we on the edge of? We were about to find out. Uh oh. Another French try.

“And Parra turns five in to seven and Ireland are drowning,” said Ryle, the igloo beside him, that once was Tony Ward, unable to comment.

“There are still 20 minutes to go,” Ryle reminded us, but while we thought that might be a good thing – plenty of time for a rousing comeback? – he had gone all Freddy Nietzsche on us, suggesting 20 minutes left scope for this “to get a whole lot worse from an Irish perspective”.

At last, there was something to warm Tony: the final whistle.

“But that Gordon D’Arcy moment . . . if he’d scored then it might have been a very different game,” said Tom, prolonging his own torment to the point where the panel very nearly said “there, there”.

“The problem with us is that we are a nation of optimists, we thought we had a chance going to Paris,” George guffawed.

And in all fairness to him, by accurately predicting the outcome of the game he had conclusively proven that Porky can, once in a blue moon, take flight.

By now the panel had us half believing that the Grand Slam was but a mirage, and that it was, perhaps, time to flush the baby and the bath water down the drain. Declan Kidney, as is his wont, called for a little calm, pointing out to Tracy Piggott that “on the days it went well for us we didn’t get overly elated, and today is not a day to get overly depressed”.

The panel slept on Kidney’s words. Conor took heed. “There’s always a massive danger that you overreact when you win and overreact when you lose,” he said. But Brent worried about an imminent, partly injury-induced “downward spiral”, and George still felt that neither the baby nor the bath water should be picked for the game against England in a fortnight.

“I will stop you there gentlemen, you have depressed the nation enough,” said Tom.

In truth, the only thing that cheered us the past few days was the sight of that man in a kilt playing his violin in a floating canoe in Vancouver. What else could you do but smile? A very lovely opening ceremony it was too, during which the BBC’s Hazel Irvine told us that Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan are the only double landlocked countries on earth. As if we didn’t know.

Hats off to Errol Kerr who, we learnt, was honoured to be asked to carry the Jamaican flag in the opening ceremony. Honest, we’re not playing down the honour at all, but, as the only member of the Jamaican team, it was hardly a close call?