Olympic Grandstand

BBC1, 7.00am

The Day They Disappeared BBC1, 9.00pm

For the sake of queen and country I felt duty bound to observe how the quest for Olympic glory was progressing. ''Not well'' is the brief answer you won't get from the BBC as it carpet-bombs the schedules with endless reports on a bloke in a dinghy, a man missing his clay pigeons, chaps on gee-gees and all the other heroic endeavours that made Britain what it is today.

Cornflakes were shared yesterday morning with Hazel Irvine and Steve Cram. You would get

chemistry between those two only if you doused them with lighter fluid. She is as pointlessly perky as ever, even

at - my bleary eyes suggested - just gone 7am. He managed to make the ''interactive option'' sound like fun. If you press the red button, I discovered, the droning stops.

Who, aside from our man with a cup of cold coffee and half a packet of Superkings, was watching this stuff? The BBC has spent a vast amount to secure, so it is reported, 250 hours of Athens coverage. That's 15,000 minutes of someone's life. Yet by the time consciousness arrived yesterday we were watching

a Briton come sixth in a 100m freestyle paddling

heat. This did not seem

to be the best use of a

very expensive satellite.

Even Adrian and Andy, our boys on the spot, said the swimming was ''amazingly slow''. This was harsh but fair. We went through nine entire heats just to remind ourselves that Ian Thorpe, the ''Thorpedo'', is probably going to win the gold even

if the Americans put a

nuclear-powered porpoise

up against him. So is it

absolutely necessary for

the BBC to show every last second of a British ''hope'' proving to be hopeless?

Over at the equestrian bit they were riding cross-country. This appeared to mean galloping over suspiciously-green grass in the middle of an arid olive grove. Mary King, who is apparently quite good, said that the course ''rides as well as it walks'', whatever that meant. She then thanked her sponsors and said: ''Hello, mummy''. This was journalism, one

felt, at the cutting edge.

For the sentient, the Olympic story is about drugs, corruption and the selling of Coca-Cola. To say as much on the BBC would be like Basil Fawlty mentioning the war. We are supposed to enthuse because some nag is ''a good, honest horse'' - as though the horse had any say in the matter - or because one of our women put in ''a really solid swim'' in the second heat

of the 200m butterfly. The butterfly may be the most curious means of locomotion ever devised, but can someone wake me up if we

actually win something?

The Day They Disappeared was a film drenched in sadness and reeking of cruelty. The numbers alone were numbing: 200,000 people in Britain are reported as missing; 500 disappear every day; the National Missing Persons Hotline alone has 10,000 names on its database. So many lives erased; so many people who have exempted themselves from existence.

The film was supposed

to examine why, foul play aside, individuals find themselves in such a position. It did so only obliquely, with hints and allusions to depression, to pressure, to sheer selfishness. At one point, ''the right to stay

missing'' was invoked.

That did not explain

Davy McCallum, who went out for a drink a year ago and never returned, leaving his partner and two kids to ponder the hole that had been left in their lives.

Nor did it explain George, the student slacker, whose response to a pile of debts was to disappear and eke

out an existence living

rough at Heathrow Airport. George seemed quite proud of his little adventure,

king, as he put it, in his

own little world, oblivious

to the pain he was causing his mother every time he sent her a birthday card. When she found him

at last it was, he said,

''a bit of a brown trousers moment''. He was something of a soiled garment of a human being himself,

as it happened.