TV View: It was one of those great "if the queen had wotsits she'd be king" moments, but when you've suffered as English cricket has the past few weeks you have to forgive Duncan Fletcher his attempts to convince Sky Sports' Mike Atherton that the Ashes actually were rather close to being a whole lot different.

"Who knows, if we'd drawn that game in Adelaide and gone on from there, well, anything could have happened," he said after the whitest of washes.

No less than ourselves, the former England captain seemed just a little unconvinced by Fletcher's protestations, but he'd given up the ghost ever since interviewing bowler Steve Harmison earlier in the week.

"Bowler", by the way, is a description the English media has been using loosely when referring to the hapless Harmison, almost as loose as his first delivery of the Ashes (so wide it almost went for a four).

"Do you feel that you are now at a stage where you can reclaim the new ball again and lead the attack," asked Atherton, urging Harmison to display a bit of the auld bulldog spirit when the whitewash was still avoidable, mathematically, if not cricketically.

"I don't know. You'll have to ask Andrew Flintoff about that. I don't know. I really don't know," Harmison miaowed, rather than barked.

"But would you like to have the new ball," Atherton persisted.

"I'm not particularly bothered, to be honest," Harmison shrugged.

"You're off home next week. Sad to be going?"

"No," Harmison beamed, coming to life, "I'm looking forward to getting away from it."

Atherton's Sky colleagues - a gang of former England captains, Ian Botham, David Gower, Nasser Hussein and such - were incandescent with, well, maybe not rage, more exasperation.

"It's one thing being humiliated, it's a whole different ball game not being too fussed about being humiliated", was the gist of their wrath.

Over on the BBC, when the whitewash was complete, Geoff Boycott was no less irked; indeed he was even driven to question the worth of his MBE. Geoff, you see, had to score 8,000 runs for England before Mrs Windsor handed him the gong; some of the current squad got the same award when they were barely out of their cricketing nappies.

"I feel so bad about mine I'm going to tie it round my cat," he was moved to declare, "it doesn't mean anything anymore. It's a joke."

Bagpuss from Yorkshire, then, is probably now sporting an impressive bit of bling, and it's around the same body part that Botham would like to place his paws. Not Bagpuss's neck - that of the person or persons who okayed the early arrival of the WABOCS (AB,NTS) in Australia. "Wives and babes of cricketers (all blonde, needless to say)", for the uninitiated.

"I'm all for the wives and families coming on tour, but not at the start - at the start you need to have a bit of a tougher side to it," said Beefy, as he was known in his prime. "If you have the families and you're pushing the baby down the high street and you're going around the park with the kids feeding the ducks, I don't actually think that's what you should be doing, that's not what you're paid to do at the start of a series."

We thought this was harsh, blaming the wimin. But maybe Beefy had a point. In his day (and heavens above and beyond, Beefy was special in his day) cricketing men said goodbye to their wives in November 1982 and only met up with them again in April 1986.

"Is that one of the neighbour's kids in the living room?" they'd ask on their return from tour duty. "No pet, that's your son, he was born just after you hit that 50 in Lahore."

In the absence of through-the-night cricket, we've had to look for a telly alternative. We've tried Deadliest Catch, in digital land, but the sport of plucking lobsters from the sea off Alaska just hasn't been floating our boat.

We even tried Celebrity Big Brother, in the hope that there'd be a sporty type in the house to excuse our viewing, like John McCririck and Chris Eubank in bygone BB days. No joy this year, unless you count former Miss Britain Danielle Lloyd, the other half of West Ham's 74-year-old striker Teddy Sheringham.

We hoped Danielle would give a lie to the claim that footballers' loved ones have "too much yardage between the goal posts". But. Then we read about Teddy testing Danielle before she appeared on the BBC's Test the Nation.

"Who was Winston Churchill - a prime minister, a president or a rapper?" he asked.

"Wasn't he the first black president of America? There's a statue of him near me - that's black," she replied.

"What did Freddie Starr supposedly eat: a rat, mouse, hamster or poo?" asked Teddy.

"Poo," said Danielle. "It must be. Why would anyone eat a hamster?" Well, fair point.