Armchair guide to mad couch disease

Considering how important the armchair television viewer is to the future earning capacity of sport, they should start taking more care of us. The pounds 670m Sky are going to pay the Premiership clubs over the next five years will be coming out of our pockets - the way Rupert Murdoch was strutting about last week you would think it was coming out of his - as will the multi-million-pound deal rugby union are about to announce and the pounds 87m rugby league is wired into this summer.

BBC and ITV are packing their schedules with every scrap of sport they can lay their hands on for a summer orgy designed to put Sky in their place audience-wise but which will also ferment disharmony among the best- ordered families. We're just pawns in a big macho display and not one TV or sporting administrator has paused to consider the great peril in which they are placing the geese they expect to lay these golden eggs for them.

They won't even take collective responsibility for warning their eager and pliant audiences that watching too much sport on TV can kill.

It may be too late, even now. The avalanche of coverage that began yesterday could have already set in motion in your slumped body the process which took a 40-year-old Boston barman close to the doors of death. He rose at noon on New Year's Day and watched three consecutive American football matches before returning to bed. Upon waking he staggered back to the chair for a further eight-hour stint interrupted only by occasional visits to the refrigerator. Thereupon he collapsed with severe chest pains and was rushed to hospital where it was found that a clot from a vein in his leg had travelled up to his lung causing a pulmonary embolus.

This is a condition that can render you dead pretty quickly and it is brought about by sitting or lying in the same position for hours. It is the reason hospitals get you on your feet as soon as possible after an operation and ought to make us aware of the dangers of being simultaneously glued to set and sofa.

It is all right for the players. They have to suffer only a small physical inconvenience and immediately they're surrounded by paramedics and the local Bupa representative. At home in a darkened room you are a sitting duck, so to speak, and with your wife having fled back to her mother and your children out practising how to break a curfew there will be no one to help you if you succumb to a lung clot.

There are many other ailments to beware. Dr Christopher Steele, a GP from Manchester, has warned that televised sport could lead to a new medical syndrome called "mad couch disease". Prolonged slouching can also cause weight gain and loss of libido. It would help, says Dr Steele, to chew raw carrots or celery and take exercise. If some of the rubbish we are about to see and hear isn't going to be bad enough, the thought of suffering it while eating raw carrot is ghastly.

But, given our importance to the great scheme of things - when pay-per- view and digital TV arrive in two years we'll have even more opportunity to donate money to them - we must ensure that as many of us as possible survive the next two months. We can do it only if we change our viewing from a passive occupation to one of involvement and there is a way to preserve one's health without detracting from the enjoyment of sports- watching.

Take today for a start. We've got non-stop access to rugby league, boxing, basketball and the First Test before noon. After lunch, we have Bulgaria v Spain, a choice of two golf tournaments, racing from Epsom and the French Oaks, Germany v Czech Republic, the French Open tennis men's finals, and Denmark v Portugal. Enough there to keep you rooted for 14 clotting hours.

Of course, real men would make the bravest gesture of all - throwing away the remote control. Continually leaving your seat to change channels would make you the fittest man in Britain. But there is no need for such a sacrifice and the zapper is an essential part of any viewer's armoury. It would help if you had more than one TV. A set in the kitchen and/or the bedroom would cut down the risk of missing something.

If you had, say, the football on the main set and the cricket and the tennis on the subsidiary sets with the volume turned full on, you could react to the roars. They take about 15 seconds to screen an action replay by which time you can be there.

You can supplement these dashes by blending in with what you see on the screen. During a football match, for instance, keep your eyes on the substitutes. Every now and then they get up from the bench and do a few exercises. Silly exercises, designed to draw attention to themselves, but nevertheless ones you can copy without too much strain.

During the cricket, you need stir yourself only when a batsman is out. Just stand up and walk with him on the spot while he returns to the pavilion and then "walk" in with the new batsman, swinging your arms and rolling your neck as they do. If only Don Bradman had known about this exercise think how good he would have been.

While the tennis is on, just do the opposite to the players. When they retire to the sidelines for a sit down every few games, you get up. Try a few imaginary shots or just shuffle your feet. As Milton said: "They also serve who only stand and wait". When the players go back to the court, you sit down. Take a drink of barley water. Rub your face with a towel. Put a focused expression on your face in case anyone is looking.

You can see how this will bring a sense of involvement as well as keeping you active. As the summer progresses, you will have new sports from which to take your lead, culminating in the Olympics, when a new world of opportunity will be open to you. Just a few precautions will be necessary - like moving the china cabinet when Jonathan Edwards is going for gold in the triple jump and remembering the dangers of having the portable TV on the edge of the bath during the synchronised swimming.

Just enjoy yourself and remember not to loll around selfishly. In the long run, they probably need us more than we need them.

Now that Euro 96 is up and running, the Football Association will probably think the Cathay Pacific incident has been peacefully concluded. Not to my satisfaction it hasn't. I still want to know what happened and so, I suspect, does the nation.

How damage came to be inflicted on two little television screens and sundry other bits of equipment to the value of pounds 5,000 by the England team is still unexplained. I cannot understand how our tabloids have not yet nailed this one. A Conservative MP needs to cause a bed-spring to creak anywhere in Europe and we know all about it almost immediately.

England's finest cause a little mid-air mayhem and they can find out nothing. All we have are rumours. One suggests an attempt to shave off Paul Gascoigne's eyebrows when he was asleep. He woke and lashed out blindly, thereby causing the damage.

Another has it that one of the smaller members of the England squad got so drunk they put him in one of the overhead lockers. He awoke, thought he was in a coffin, lashed out in panic, came crashing down and thus caused the damage.

We won't be satisfied until we know the truth. And it will out, one day.