NOSTALGIA, as they say, ain't what it used to be. At least not to Sky. Whenever the station dons rose-tinted spectacles they never cure the severe myopia that leads them to miss out on any sport before the advent of satellite television.

Or at least until they bought the rights. And the main thrust of How TV Changed Football Foreverwas that any soccer that existed before the Premiership was really not very good, and isn't it great how big these buckets of cash are?

There's always something kinda suspicious about Sky documentaries. It's a bit like they get Michael Moore in to direct them, you're entertained but wary that you're only being presented one side of the debate. They're also curiously schizophrenic affairs, veering from no-expense-spared to shoddy, and from intelligent to crass.

The first thing on the agenda was the character assassination of soccer before the Premiership, concentrating on the '80s and portraying it solely as grey concrete stadiums with walls for urinals, footballers with naff haircuts and rampant hooliganism. If soccer was a musical movement you'd have expected someone to stand up and say that they were there at the beginning, man, and unless you've been urinated on while standing on a terrace you just didn't understand. But nobody did that. In fact, there was actually some odd gloating that the game had been taken away from the thuggish working classes and the clear suggestion that soccer violence is a thing of the past. Hmmm.

Impressively, Rupert Murdoch removed his horns and turned up for a rare interview explaining how Sky and satellite television was dying a death at the time, losing up to �3 million a day. But the explosion of interest in English soccer created by the drama of England's progress at Italia '90 and the soap opera that was Paul Gascoigne's life, combined with the newly-broken away Premier League, gave Sky their chance to step in and they seized it with both hands.

The documentary's bi-polar choice of talking heads shone through here too.

Having earlier had to suffer the weightless witterings of James King (BBC Radio 1 Film Critic) and Sam Delaney (Radio Five Live), we now had Murdoch and Sky Sports managing director Vic Wakeling talking us through how Sky set about selling their product. King, in one of the nerdiest statements about soccer you'll ever hear, described the coming together of Posh and Becks as being like when the photon streams crossed in Ghostbusters. Felt a bit more like the time Picard was seduced by one of the Borg to us, but whatever. Wakeling though was outstanding, breaking down the little techniques and innovations Sky concocted to make the game seem more immediate and dramatic, extreme sleight of hand indeed when you're trying to make the Monday night clash of Blackburn and Everton seem like mustsee TV.

Appearing throughout were the round-table ramblings of a discussion group that seemed good enough value to have been a show of its own. We were even treated to having Henry Winter of The Daily Telegraph and Barry Davies harangue Andy Gray over Sky's hyperbole. While Gray's defence against the charge rang a little hollow, he was of course able to rationally point out that the coverage of soccer is brilliant these days and that's largely down to Sky.

And that insufferably smug approach ran throughout the programme. Far from being the root of all evil, money was portrayed as being the saving grace of soccer in England, that only for it there'd still be rank stadiums and footballers with perms. The contempt for everything pre-Premiership was such that you'd wonder how they ever decided it was worth paying over �300 million for back in 1992.

Even when some of Sky's missteps were recalled, it all seemed to be done like a boxer wistfully describing the jabs he absorbed before claming the belt.

That much triumphalism is hard to stomach.

Then the future of football coverage was pondered, turning the programme into an extended advert for high definition TV, including some clowns pondering whether in the future you'll be able to get games beamed by Sky straight into your brain. Yes, probably, but there'll be a subscription fee and a shed load of adverts.

Technology is at the heart of the coolest thing about this week's Wimbledon coverage too - Hawkeye. It may sound like a mortal enemy of He-Man's, but it's impressive to see any system that doesn't assist with decisions, but actually makes them. You start to wonder what the point is of the guy in the high chair at the net. If the system has any flaw, it's that it's too perfect, removing any need for discussion of its decisions. This means we miss out on lots of chances of a good row between a player and an umpire and that the type of spittle-spewing blow-ups we deserve are dying out, as even John McEnroe would have found it difficult to get in a swearing match with a computer program. Shame.