Back in the real world, Park Live has actually gone from strength to strength and enjoyed possibly its best episode on Wednesday last, helped by some entertaining guests in the shape of Colm Parkinson and Brendan Devenney. It has also taken up the brave and attractive habit of replaying scenes from guests' histories that they might rather forget, refusing to plamas them with past glories, as others (yes you Des Cahill) have tended to do over the years.

The perpetrator of the sketch that just won't go away, Neil Delamere, has continued to make comic attempts which can at best be described as not that funny. And his production team have been guilty of replaying other sketches for four weeks in a row that weren't particularly brilliant in the first place. Still, Park Live is getting tantalisingly close to essential viewing for any GAA fan, and its disturbing trip to the front pages will do little other than secure it some higher viewing figures.

Speaking of idiots, BBC's Panorama focused on some of the less agreeable folk that travelled around Germany a couple of months ago, following the least entertaining circus of all time: England. With the Germans keen to promote the greatest soccer show the world had ever seen, there was the odd report of arrests, but a casual observer might have thought there was little more than a few isolated incidents of hooliganism. This hour told a different story.

The violence that did follow England thankfully lacked the headline value of deaths, but was present nonetheless.

Undercover footage showed the familiar roll call of clowns itching for a punch up with anyone seen without a George's cross. The crowds chanted "I'd rather be a Paki than a Kraut" in Frankfurt, and sang "10 German bombers" while giving Nazi salutes in Nuremburg. There was also the charming song aimed at locals, "My grandad killed your grandad, toora loora ley". Individually, they were even less attractive, imparting such memorable phrases as: "I want to f**king punch a person, but they won't give it, will they?" and "The only thing I want to do in life is slice a Muslim's head off."

Brazil fans, the all-dancing epitome of football fun, were attacked and abused for wandering into a boozed up section of England supporters, forced to flee without their flags and with "Who the f**k are you?" ringing in their ears. One only escaped a kicking because of the presence of police and cameras. The Burberry-hat wearing, red-shirted young man who had to hold back turned his ire to the cameraman, accusing him of being un-English for filming the incident.

But the most depressing aspect of the whole thing was the tacit acceptance that this sort of behaviour was an inevitability. "Conflict's ingrained in human nature, " said one besuited former Stoke City hooligan who was hauled out for some insider quotes. "If we stripped ourselves down and took all our nice computers away and our nice cars and our comfy chairs and put us all together as we were thousands of years ago, what's the first thing we do? Fight over that stick cos we can make a fire with that.

We're animals." Maybe evolution theory hasn't quite made it to Stoke yet.

But while it's very easy to tut, the scenes of bottle throwing and police baiting shown were rarely worse than those seen on Dublin's streets just a few months ago. It's still referred to as the English disease, but with German fans attempting ambushes and Poles keen to fight, they certainly weren't alone.

Veering admirably away from sensationalism, the Panorama producers didn't attempt to make things look worse, or indeed better, than they were. There was only one incident that looked as if it could spill over into a full-scale riot and endanger locals, when drunken England fans baited German supporters who had just beaten Sweden in the early evening.

Elsewhere, while unpleasant, flashpoints seemed contained, restricted to late nights and easily avoidable.

Carl Lewis has been quoted as saying that drugs in sport will only be eradicated when drugs in society are. Similarly, anti-social behaviour at soccer can only be reasonably assumed to be a thing of the past when it doesn't happen in Leeds or Warsaw or Cologne of a Saturday night. As the Panorama voiceover said over footage of young men hurling abuse and missiles at passers-by and police, "Their behaviour was not dissimilar to that witnessed in our town centres at the weekend." It would be misguided to imagine that any of this had much to do with sport.