Now, there's nothing bad about covering the World Cup and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. This is as good as this . . . or, you'd have to imagine, any . . . job gets. And yet, safe in the knowledge that we're straying dangerously close to my-wallet's-toosmall-for-my-fifties territory, a small grumble would go something like: Watching football on television here is, well, different. See? Only a small grumble.

Of course, there's a whole thicket of things that are different. For one, you don't get to use the word thicket very much. For another, not a single taxi driver has so much as blinked when faced with the prospect of having to come up with change for a 50 note.

But watching football is the last shared experience, right? A tweak here and there aside, you'd have thought it would be pretty much the same deal the world over. Billo and the boys in the studio, Motty and a mate in the box, maybe a touchline reporter or two.

Not so. Here, one of the main terrestrial stations seems to have spent most of its budget on the construction of an elaborate open-air set that makes the coverage look not wholly unlike those old BBC seaside roadshows you sometimes see clips of with Terry Wogan telling some 17year-old in a swimsuit that she's a grand big lassie for 17. You half expect a fat bloke in a string vest with a knotted hankie on his head to appear at any time.

The point of it seems to be that this is a World Cup for fans so let's fill an openair set with fans waving inflatable things in the air and straining to appear in the shot while we're analysing the game.

Think of all those Jim Carney/Marty Morrissey interviews done on the pitch after a championship game and transplant Michael Lyster, Colm O'Rourke and Joe Brolly into the middle of them and you're getting the picture.

The set is clearly where they've spent their money since their pundits . . . Urs Meier and Jurgen Klopp . . . can't exactly have broken the bank. Meier is the former referee who got death threats from England fans after his decision to disallow a John Terry goal against Portugal sent them out of Euro 2004. He's all opennecked shirts and slicked-back hair and there's just a touch of Hollywood about him. Still, with so many former German football figures to pick on, it seems strange they went for a referee.

Especially one who, when called upon to talk the people through the most bizarre refereeing performance to date . . .Graham Poll's rush of blood on Thursday night when he gave Josip Simunic three yellow cards before sending him off . . .Meier just smiled and shrugged. "Let's see somebody post his address on the internet, " you could nearly hear him thinking.

And Klopp isn't short of pizzazz himself. Floppy-fringed with John Lennon glasses and never intentionally more than 10 seconds away from breaking into laughter, he's the coach of FC Mainz.

Again, not exactly Rudi Voller but that's because Voller and Lothar Mattheus and all the other personalities you've heard of are gainfully employed by other stations.

The best of these is a cable station that insists on putting Mattheus and Steffen Effenberg side by side in the studio. When this vista first flickered into view, it was hard to put your finger on what was wrong with the picture.

And then a switch flicked. These two hate each other. Effenberg had a chapter in his autobiography called What I Think Of Lothar Mattheus and left the page blank. Now there's a television producer thinking on his feet.

But the strangest thing about football on German TV is the absence of a co-commentator. There is but one voice to be heard and that one voice doesn't overextend itself. There'll be whole swathes of dead air with no commentary before our guy will pipe up and say Michael Ballack's name as if he'd woken up to find himself commentating at the World Cup. It doesn't quite make you pine for Andy Gray or mean you'll hug your TV at home the next time you hear Lawro's dulcet tones. It's just different, is all.