On The Premier League:They call Newcastle United English football's longest-running soap opera, but there comes a time when even the most popular shows should bow their heads and await the icy bite of the commissioner's axe.

Fourteen years in prime-time is a good run for any soap, but Tyneside's time is up. Viewing figures might still be high - capacity crowds are a given at St James' Park - but the plots have become wearyingly predictable and the characters distinctly unlikable. Cancellation cannot come soon enough.

Now, if there has to be a place for Newcastle in the TV schedules, it must be as part of one of those spirit-crushing nostalgia programmes where faceless celebrities pick at the still-twitching carcass of a much-beloved decade.

Certainly nobody who revelled in the sight of Kevin Keegan slumped over the Anfield advertising hoards or Philippe Albert - the Premier League's last great mustachioed footballer - gloriously chipping Peter Schmeichel during a 5-0 rout of Manchester United could deny Newcastle some air-time in

I Love the 90s. That was a show which had it all - a riotously entertaining cast, some genuinely thrilling football and the chance, however slim, that all the hullabaloo might - just might - produce a trophy or two.

In the Keegan era, not even the most stoney-faced critic could fail to warm to the sheer lunacy of Newcastle's endeavours - the brazen commitment to attacking football, the unremittingly chaotic defending, their hopelessly optimistic supporters. In an era of cynical commercialisation, it was football with a smile spread wide across its goofy, gurning face.

But times have changed. Newcastle are now a byword for managerial incompetence, boardroom buffoonery and preening, posturing players who proudly boast of giving it their all in a home match against the league leaders as if the supporters who pay their ludicrously inflated wages should be grateful for the gesture. At £50,000-a-week, the least they can give back is a little professionalism.

And what of those supporters? Sad to report, but the cloud of negativity which has shrouded the Republic of Geordania ever since Bobby Robson's scandalous sacking as manager in 2004 has settled on them more thickly than anyone.

Trips to St James' used to be refreshing antidotes to the prawn-sandwich atmosphere pervading most Premier League grounds. But no longer - now, the silence at Newcastle's citadel is only shattered when the fans bellow dog's abuse at their players, the manager or both.

Perhaps the defining image of Newcastle United in 2007 came in the recent home game against Liverpool, when a television shot of Sam Allardyce - standing, beleaguered and bewildered in the dug-out - was framed by home fans, their faces contorted in fury, screaming abuse while the game played out unnoticed in front of them. Liverpool might, as Manchester United fans point out, be England's self-pity city, but Newcastle seems to have claims on being its capital of self-loathing.

Newcastle fans are not stupid and, deep down in those great Geordie beer-guts, they must realise that to demand Allardyce's head on a platter after just four months in the job is absurd. But to lash out at the manager - and particularly one whose muck-and-nettles philosophy is so starkly at odds with their great messiah, Keegan - is the natural response when you have seen your hopes and ideals crushed by years of gross mismanagement.

At least they no longer have to stomach the vile Freddy Shepherd and his equally unpleasant band of cohorts. It always seemed bizarre that a man who derided Newcastle fans for buying merchandise by the bucket-load - thus propping up his own empire - and labelled the region's women "dogs", all while sitting in a Marbella brothel, should have been allowed to retain any position of authority at the club.

Then again, this is Newcastle we're talking about. Normal rules have never applied, although the new owner, Mike Ashley - one of the replica shirt-sporting idiots, according to Shepherd - at least appears to have the club's best interests at heart.

It is also typical that a month of doom-mongering and despair should be the preface for Newcastle's best performances of the season, first against Arsenal and then in Saturday's defeat of Birmingham. Pride has been restored and Allardyce is sleeping a little easier, but it is unimaginable that the peace will endure.

Newcastle were custom-built for turmoil and it is only a matter of time before the next crisis rolls along, provoking the usual howls of discontent from the Gallowgate End. For the rest of us, there will be just tedium and, possibly, mild irritation that this mighty institution can remain mired in mediocrity. Perhaps it is time for us all to switch channels.