The subtle shift can be explained by the fact that, where once the BBC would simply show a set of results in silence, now the presenter reads the scores as video from the most important games — of players celebrating; never of the action itself — is displayed. “It is ridiculous to say, ‘Look away now,’ if you’re then going to talk about it,” Gnanasegaram said.

Consideration — in the form of a short pause and a purposefully vague start to the script — is then afforded to those who might not react as quickly to the warning as they once did. “We try to give people a fighting chance,” Royall said in a phone interview.

Only when enough time has elapsed for the ritual to be respected will the results of a set of games played several hours earlier be revealed to the British public, many of whom, by that stage, will have been fully informed of precisely what happened for some time. It is like NBC’s careful husbandry of what has happened every day at the Olympics, only performed almost every week of every year.

It is hard to tell definitively, but the warning itself — “if you don’t want to know the scores, please look away now” — is thought to date to the days of David Davies, a BBC broadcaster from the early 1970s to 1994 who went on to work in a number of senior roles for the Football Association.

Davies cannot quite pinpoint when he conjured the sentence; he is not, in truth, even entirely sure it was he. “Allegedly, I am responsible,” he said. “I suspect I did invent it, but I am quite sanguine about claiming it. Still, I’m happy to be credited with it, if nobody else wants to do so.”

It came about, he said, because the producers of “Match of the Day” in those days did not want “the news giving away the results,” fearing it would dissuade viewers from tuning in.

Davies regarded it as “naïve” even then to assume that fans would not want to find out their team’s result long before the evening news, but it should be noted that “avoiding the scores” was common enough that in 1973 an entire episode of “Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?,” a wildly popular sitcom, was devoted to the concept.