There is a cider commercial on television that boasts proudly of its "hand-picked" apples. Now, I ask you: what earthly relevance could it have to me whether the soily claw plucking your apples is made of tungsten-steel alloy or human flesh?

Come back when your apples are harvested by the power of the mind, pressed using a special rotor whose only fuel is love, and maybe we can talk. And it is cider, not cidre. Look it up.

Then there is the car advert that claims, without the slightest irony, that its new coupe creates "a new form of space". Just consider that. Imagine some engineer in a Bavarian motoring workshop (hint, hint) has actually managed to invent a new kind of space.

Should they not be making a slightly bigger fuss about it? Why is this guy not on BBC 'Breakfast' answering Bill Turnbull's banal questions? Has anybody informed Stephen Hawking?

Arsene Wenger believes football is a product of wider society, and he is right, although not in the way he means. On Saturday, he was the unwitting star of the latest innovation from broadband-TV fusion act BT Sport.

Whenever a penalty is taken, a box appears in the corner of the screen, capturing the manager's priceless reaction. So, 17 minutes into Arsenal v Napoli, up stepped Lukas Podolski. He missed. Wenger's expression, meantime, shifted not one millimetre.

That same, familiar blankness; that same, familiar pensiveness, like an old man sitting on the promenade tracking the progress of a very distant ferry. And so an arresting, if largely pointless, experiment met with mixed results.

Later, in the tunnel, Wenger was thudded with inquiries on a well-worn theme. "Luis Suarez is the name on the fans' lips," the interviewer insisted. "It's been widely reported a bid's gone in. How long are you willing to wait? Are you still going to spend big? Show me your wallet! SHOW IT!" Wenger cocked his head and politely changed the subject.

These days, it is fashionable to see Wenger as an ossifying relic of a previous age – still sharp of mind, but with a simple idealism hopelessly out of step with modern football's relentless shape-shifting: a Concorde manager in a Ryanair world.

When he reluctantly decided this summer to pursue a "big tent" signing, he found a market more pathologically crazed than ever.

Prices were being hoicked off the scale. Wenger was the citizen of 1920s Weimar Germany who goes out to a restaurant, pops to the gents, and returns to find the price of his steak has risen to 200m marks.

And yet when one considers the outset of this new season, it is hard not to share a little of this incredulity. Though BT Sport is currently one of those things everybody talks about but not many have actually seen, its presence alone has heated the marketplace to boiling point.

No escape

There is no escape. Football is back, and everywhere. At any given moment, you are no more than 100 feet from a BT Sport billboard poster. Sky has scrambled its employees like fighter planes to promote its coverage.

Gary Neville even turned up at the cricket yesterday, rabbiting away on both Sky and the BBC's Test Match Special.

On Thursday, meanwhile, 'Sky Sports News' brought us '92 Live', in which it visited all 92 league clubs in a day. If this was an attempt to demonstrate its unstinting passion for football, it instead resembled the sort of behaviour that might place a person on the autistic spectrum.

Imagine if your mate told you he was visiting all 92 league clubs in one day, and responded to your puzzled look with the words: "I just really like football". Exactly.

Brace yourself, then, for the ridiculous. Not scattered ridiculous, or isolated outbreaks of ridiculous, but an ominously gathering ridiculous, poised for deluge.

This is the age of the empty gesture, the pointless phrase: the 92-club savant-trek, the hand-picked apple; the manager-penalty reaction-box, the entirely new form of space.

Perhaps that look in Wenger's eyes is not a blankness, but a bleakness; the hyper-awareness of a man who sees the ridiculous all around him. The eyes not of an ageing maverick or a lone crackpot, but of the only man who really, truly understands. (© Daily Telegraph, London)

Irish Independent