Such fuss about John Terry! And the big question seems to be, now that he has been fired: Was he a proper role model as captain of England's football team? There's a laugh. Wherever football is played, people are diving, feigning injury, fouling opponents if they think they can get away with it, and generally behaving like ASBO first elevens. Sex, which is where John Terry comes in, is at the tail end the problem. The real problem of football is football, not role models.

Once, the big man of the game was Alan Hardaker, Football League secretary. He sat in his office near Lytham St Annes sea front and voiced his explosively forceful convictions. Footballers did not earn a lot by today's standards. And all was relatively well.

But then the revolution. The sport sold itself. Mercenaries came in of every creed, colour and nationality to fight for a flag to which they owned no allegiance. The talents in their feet were capable of earning getting on for as much as bankers employing their heads but their lust for money was identical..

Supporting this multicultural army of high-earners were the life-long supporters, paying eye-watering entry fees for the privilege.

Task accomplished. Football had sold itself, betrayed its followers, and the logical result should have been that since there was no valid team to support, the terraces should be empty.

Instead, supporters convinced themselves that it was THEIR sport, THEIR team and rarely in human history can there have been so crass a conclusion.

Also, illogically, clubs with enormous incomes began to run enormous debt, a mind-boggling achievement.

This agony was best shown in the words of a Julian Coman, a Manchester United supporter, who stopped going to Old Trafford after regularly attending games for 32 years.

His was an agonising cry from the heart, printed by The Observer, in January, and it echoed what many in the broad church of the game felt themselves, whatever their club.

He wrote: “Like a footballing Lehman Brothers, England's best-supported club has maintained its outward swagger while being devoured from within by a toxic combination of excessive debt and wildly irresponsible assumptions of future success. Too big to fail? Probably. Too big to go into wholly unnecessary decline? Certainly not. And if United's results turn sub-prime, who will finance the debt, currently standing at £711m?”

The cricket commentator John Arlott said that cricket reflected the era in which it is played and he was bang-on right. Cricket now is a form of show-business. No “stands the clock at ten to three, and is there honey still for tea.”. It's all wham-bang technicolor.

Arlott could have added football to his theory in an era where players have become products.

Somewhere along the line, as in banking, the free-for-all will either have to curb itself or the game will implode.

I have never felt frenzy about football or any club in it; but I did once write the odd article about it, hence a few meetings with Hardaker. And a theme I rather liked was that since clubs are sustained by their fans, the fans should have a strong voice in their affairs at board level, chosen by supporters' votes. The big money – and now the much-bigger money - men have had too much influence for too long.

It demands a revolution. I see no sign of one at the moment. I see only the agony of people like Julian Coman.

On 6 January, 1957, Alan Hardaker was appointed Football League secretary with offices in Starkie-street, Preston. An incoming League president wanted a change.

The unanimous choice was the former Sandown Hotel in Clifton Drive, Lytham St Annes, bought for £11,000. What's that now? Less than a day's wages?

When Hardaker first joined the staff of the League, it had six full time employees. By 1977 this had increased to 25. To kick a cliché into play – How times change!

He died just 30 years ago this year at the age of 68.

I just wish he were back to see what happened to his empire. I would like to hear his advice for the people who plainly need it. And I suspect that it would be typically blunt.

Eh?

A degree of deafness lurks in the family. My mother had the TV so loud that you could hear it 50 yards up the road. She was a local broadcasting organisation in her own wrong. Yet when you entered the house, she was not reeling from shock: she was a yard away from the set, bent forward, wondering why it was whispering to her.

It's a deafness that comes with age. A wayward gene, I would think, limping in the family. I could, in my own interest, have sworn on a stack of hearing aids that this disability came from sitting in armoured car turrets as the miserably small gun they called the Big Gun went bang and damaged my delicate appendages, but no. Better not.Truth and dignity. I shall benefit in the great beyond where such deceptions are written indelibly in the Good Book of Time.

Some people are profoundly deaf. I am, I like to think, but without conviction, profound and disagreeably deaf.

Deafness leads to some remarkable phone conversations, most better than the original:

"The weather looks good today." "She didn't!" "What?" "Heather - fall in the mud." "Who?" "Whoever you were talking about, then. I thought it was Heather." "I was talking about the weather." "Is it?" "Is it what?" "Raining - you said weather." "No, it's fine." "Yes, I'm fine, thanks. Had a good night's sleep." "Oh, good." "What do you mean - oh God? Don't you want me to have a good night's sleep?" "Forget it."

I have watched all of Taggart without understanding more than a few words. My enjoyment comes from Scottish abrasiveness - those undicipherable sandpaper voices grinding away endlessly like machinery in a joiner's workshop. Wallander is entirely different, a master-class in every department: conversation clear, hearable and usually without distractions, Swedish location endlessly fascinating, and with acting of consistently high quality, particularly from Kenneth Branagh. If only they were all like that...

I was watching Silent Witness and and my word, it was. Silent, I mean. I turned up the TV sound. Everything louder but nothing clearer. I turned on the speaker behind me and was then confused from two directions. How the dog gets on with that I don't know. He hears sounds that haven't occurred yet.

There was an almighty row going on, as I could see. The girl scientist warring with the bloke scientist over what happened with their limping boss trying to sort out the mess. Somebody had died on the stairs. Did she fall or was she pushed? - that was the crux. There was a lot of blood about, and later, a naked corpse on a table, laid out for the camera in an indelicate sort of way. Well, it looked indelicate. Could have been a mark on the screen, I suppose.

Occasionally there would be a remark full of portent. You could see it on the face of the listener. That is the point at which I turned to my wife and said, "What did she say?" and as she began to repeat it, she missed the next important bit. Happens a lot, that. You miss the plot, so whoever you are with begins to miss it too. The murder mystery could easily migrate from screen to fireside.

In the end you are left only with the news. There's a key Sky newscaster who has a voice like gravel and he comes over beautifully well, matched to my ears like wings to a butterfly. I'm putting him up for a gong if HM Queen is agreeable.

But of course you can't listen to news all day. The fifteenth screening of a bit of footage from an Iran riot tends to pall a bit. You recognise everybody in it eventually. They have become old friends with their urgent eyes and aggressive shouts. "Ah, there's old moustache face again," you say. "And his lad with the flag right behind him." It is almost like being at the local market where you recognise most of the faces but don't know anybody.

So you attend to the mail. Any problems, the mail from companies says - give us a ring. They all say that. They don't like emails in case there's a mistake they can't cover up. Letters are anathema to them. Only the managing director uses them. Phoning does not leave evidence because there's little chance of the caller recording the chat, although the recipient no doubt will. Fine. We understand the reasoning; give them a ring, then, and they might as well be talking Urdu. Perhaps they are. There is some method of communicating by telephone involving technology but I can't be bothered with it.

Girls at the bank have a habit of saying things to me. I don't know what they are, but I always reply "No, thank you," in the belief that they are trying to sell something. It's not much of a reply, I suppose, if they happen to have said, "And how are you today?" Or, "We are giving everyone £5,000 this morning. How would you like it - cheque or cash?"

"No thank you." They would put you down for beatification for that.

Then there are the tills. The girl says, "Umscremitchen, plis." I do not reply. I put my groceries into my little green bag and at the end of that performance I say, "Sorry - how much did you say?" By this time I am composed: I can read lips as well as listen so I get the information I need, and it is only a simple matter then of tapping in the wrong pin number, apologising to girl and queue behind, and leaving.

My father had a soft spot for my mother's mother, aka my grandmother, and she was deaf without benefit of hearing aids. She was troubled by wind, or rather we were troubled by her wind: we had loud reports of it, but she retained her benign expression in her rocking chair. We tried not to notice. "It's her ears," we would say.

A friend paid £2,000 for his one hearing aid and that put him in shock for ages. I have two, one for each ear. That might be called a balanced budget. I reckon the contents of my head are worth far more than me.

Some of my friends use the old National Health aids - a plastic box fitted behind the ear. I always thought they looked as though some strange creature was attempting entry and that it found its way blocked by another bit of itself attached to a tube. A strange situation for a sci-fi novelist to exploit: the hearing aid that ate itself.

It is as well to be philosophical.

"By deafness one gains in one respect more than one loses; one misses more nonsense than sense," said Horace Walpole, more than once because he presumably liked his own wit. I agree with him. Nowadays, if conversation becomes tiresome, it can be switched off at will, or even his wife, Alice. Horace did not have that modern facility.

Recently, I had this email: a couple of friends suggesting that our group should all have Skype phones so that we could not only speak with each other free, but see each other on our computers.

"Yes, the sea temperature is 68 degrees and we are sitting on the verandah."

"Oh, really. Who's Miranda, and why are you sitting on her?"

"Who mentioned Miranda?"

"You did."

"Ah, i said verandah."

"My apologies. it's the ears of course. It's four below here and the postman has just left. I think he's taking up ice skating because he's been on his back three times and that was only in the drive."

Skype is not for me, I think, which is a pity. In the manner of Stype, I type.

I like a keyboard to say what I am thinking and a screen to see what I am saying, if you get the drift.

Emailing friends are now connected by Skype, I gather. They suggested others join. I stayed quiet. My contribution would, I fear, drive them mad.

Nancy Banks-Smith has, for 40 years, been TV critic of The Guardian and I claim some historic pride in that because I knew her when she had nowt.

Well, no. That is a cliche too far. She lived in Blackburn, the daughter of a publican, and she went to a posh girls' school. She was so quiet as a young reporter on the Northern Daily Telegraph that you could hear her thoughts drop.

When she scattered pound notes around our sub-editor's desk and strolled off without noticing, I knew she would go far. As it happened she went in the wrong direction first of all. To the Daily Express, which, like some other newspapers at that time, shoved high talent like hers in a cupboard and frequently mislaid the key. Michael Parkinson was in the same cupboard, figuratively speaking, that is.

The talent was marked; it had to bear fruit and fruit it bore. Nancy Banks-Smith in her TV critic mode, writing about Alan Sugar's Apprentice (chosen at random to show consistent talent):

"The losing team turned on each other in time-honoured fashion. I cannot with a straight face repeat what Mona, the beauty queen, said about Debra, who was once voted Mouth of the Year. Debra called Anita a puppet or, possibly, a muppet. Anita, a lawyer, said: 'I'm intelligent, articulate, eloquent. I'm the complete package. I've got the rainbow of skills that no one else will have.' ... And was the first to be fired.

"Whisked away by taxi, she said mildly: 'I just think Sir Alan doesn't like lawyers.' And, as a parting shot, that he'd be sorry. As Sir Alan, who puts great faith in what his gut tells him, nearly always chooses the wrong apprentice, she could be right."

The lively mind, thank heaven, lives on.

Retrospective

Accrington Stanley, Alan Bennett, Eddie Braben, My cruel sea, Derek Jamieson, Roy Farran, Charles Lamb, Sam's chophouse gang, Lake district: Water's little dance, Martyrs of Clay Cross, Edmund Spenser, Nowells of Read hall, Cecil the Mink, Oh, to be a countryman, Technology rampant, Rosie Boot, Cooks and all that, Les at 100, The Paslew Saga, Wellington's England remembered; Pendle witches; Greenhouse weeds: a mortifying tale; Mottled legs; Dentistry; On growing old; Edmund the money man; the new editor; barristers and journalists; Memory and Last of the Summer Wine; the Yates's experience; Rose: the ghost and the ring; The gravy train; Lillian Ross of the New Yorker and John Huston; Brian Duff and a Rook; Meditation; Party conferences; Press: the underclass; A bwoody gweat wow; Tub the donkey; The Clitheroe Kid

Main contents list

Lancashire affairs:

www.lankylad.com

Media

www.gentlemenranters.com

http://booksaboutjournalism.com/

skidmoresisland.blogspot.com

Geoffrey Mather (c) 2010