Fans of the hilarity that stems from innocent verbal stumblings briefly had their needs met in the early nineties by the Ronnie Corbett-hosted vehicle Small Talk. This show featured celebrities trying to guess what small children were describing with their limited yet winning vocabularies.

Paul Wilson, writing his excellent column in the Observer yesterday, has stumbled across a potential solution for this long-neglected gap in the entertainment schedule. You wouldn’t even need the panel of celebrity guessers, just footballers thrashing around in search of an escape from the most basic enquiries should provide comedy enough.

Over to Paul: “There’s something satisfyingly old-fashioned about footballers liking steak, though. It reminds you of all those questionnaires in all those old match programmes, when every week the answer to ‘Favourite meal?’ would always be the same. I thought that tradition had died - the format, not the favourite meal - but it resurfaced last week when Richard Chaplow, two-goal hero of Preston’s win against Stoke, allowed his finishing prowess to be undermined by an interview in the programme. To the innocent question: ‘Which team will you be supporting in Euro 2008?’, Chaplow replied: ‘England.’ When the unfortunate facts about England and Euro 2008 were pointed out to him and he was invited to change his mind, Chaplow plumped instead for Argentina.”