I'm already hooked on the BBC's Olympics coverage, so adieu to fresh air, writes MATT BARLOW. There isn't the desperate need to compete for attention as there is in the football

Day one of 16 in the Olympic armchair soon turns out to be a brisk refresher course in the art of the red button and Test runs to figure out if tea and toast can be fixed in the time it takes the BBC to advertise whatever serialised drama Martin Freeman is in these days.

Six hours in, there’s a British bronze in the bag, an upset in the fencing, a stack of empty teacups and time trialling cyclists are skidding around in Parisian puddles.

By the time hosts France reach the final of the men’s rugby sevens, the not-so-smart TV set has twice suggested it might be best to turn it off, and half the country are well on the way to becoming experts again on the technical details of stuck landings and splashless entries.

We’re all signed up and settled in by the time Hazel Irvine skilfully sidesteps the appearance of two hapless characters clad in high-vis vests on the outside of the studio glass, busy doing something in a window-cleaning gondola like an updated remake of a classic Morecambe and Wise sketch.

With Irvine in her element, the Eiffel Tower shimmering through the drizzle and a general absence of competition, the Beeb can relax into what they’re good at, stretching across sports beyond the mainstream with a range of brilliant commentators and analysts to talk us through unfamiliar terrain.

None of them are more impressive than Mark Foster, measured and genuinely insightful through the breaststroke heats.

Really, we don’t need Gordon Ramsay conducting a celebrity interview with Adam Peaty, talking for large parts of it about himself, before wrapping the whole thing up by declaring it a ‘good job’, when others on the payroll would do it better.

And we could have done without the peripheral plugs for what was live-streaming on the iPlayer (mostly judo and badminton by the look of it) with QR codes flashing up in the corner to make viewers think there might be something better going on elsewhere.

At least there isn’t the same desperate need to compete for attention as there is in the football with Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer trying to out-Keane Roy Keane for a soundbite that might just go viral, although there was a casual merde-bomb dropped on BBC Breakfast by Fred Sirieix.

Yes him, the ubiquitous French fella from Channel 4’s First Dates, whose daughter Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix is in the British diving team.

His twinkly charisma was going down a treat amid a cringeworthy green-screen café scene complete with pastries, until he waded into an explanation on the significance of the national emblem of France, the cockerel, still singing its heart out even when its feet are ‘stuck in the s***’.

Co-host Jeanette Kwakye scrambled clumsily to offer viewers an unnecessary apology. JJ Chalmers moved in for a pain aux raisin.

Over on Eurosport, they were embracing the obscure, digging in for a long shift on the fencing with the men’s sabre, which is basically too fast to watch, with fencers dressed as astronauts, thrusting and lunging with lots of posturing towards the referee, whipping off the face guard to implore.

Still, it served up the drama. Without Martin Freeman et al. That’s the thing about live sport. Any old sport. That’s the thing about the Olympic Games on free-to-air TV. No frills required. Once you’re in this far, you’re hooked. Adieu fresh air and exercise. Bonjour spinal curvature.