Essential Viewing

I RECENTLY spent forty minutes watching hippopotami porn on the café television screen. Not the wide-mouthed copulation of semi-aquatic herbivores, captured in the lustful throes of one-on-one heavyweight hardcore, but endless footage of oozing puddles, viscous mudbanks and glutinous landslides.

It wasn’t the stark obsession with extreme weather conditions that surprised me about Portuguese television, but the fact that neither Cristiano Ronaldo nor José Mourinho appeared for almost three-quarters of an hour. What is the world coming to?