TV View/Mary Hannigan: Peter Alliss was livid. So livid, in fact, he was threatening to leave the commentary box and go for a cup of tea. That's the nice thing about golf, when people get angry they have a cup of tea, rather than punch somebody's lights out. It truly is a gentleman's game - a lady's game too, but only at off-peak hours.

"This is the only game where the players themselves are responsible for their scores, that whole situation that's just happened is ridiculous," Alliss fumed, after Mark Roe and Jesper Parnevik had been disqualified.

The BBC man, of course, had a point. Waterford had 18 of them at the end of Saturday afternoon's rousing hurling qualifier, five less than Wexford. Waterford men - as any Waterford man would tell you - are as honest as the day is long, but if their captain Tony Browne had been asked to fill in Wexford's scorecard at the end of the game surely he'd have been tempted to scribble "1-10" instead of "1-202 and hope nobody would notice.

(Granted, Wexford might have spotted the absence of their name from the quarter-final draw).

Anyway, it was all a bit crushing.

"Are you now thinking about challenging for this jug?" Hazel Irvine asked Roe after his 67 in the third round, "Is it realistic?" "Well, it is now," he beamed. Thirteen minutes later. "Mark, what can I say?" Irvine almost wept.

Roe, surprisingly, didn't want to punch anybody's lights out, he just wanted to go home and have a cup of tea with his family.

"What can you do?" he said, "life goes on, the tournament goes on, rules are rules, they're there to protect the game, I'm not bigger than the game of golf."

Is he related to Padraig Harrington? Please, let this man have another day in the sun.

Handily enough, the BBC had the last man to suffer a catastrophic British Open experience on commentating duty all week. And, indeed, Jean van de Velde was just as angry about the disqualification as Alliss, even saying he'd go for a cup of tea with him. That's how enraged he was.

Van de Velde, though, put his and Roe's misfortunes down to fate, but he didn't have a lot to say about Kenny Perry's recent exceptional form.

"What is it about Perry recently?" Steve Rider asked him. "Don't ask me, I don't know," the Frenchman shrugged. Silence. (Psst, Jean? If you want a career in sports punditry remember: you should always offer an opinion, even if you don't have one, and never, ever leave your interviewer high and dry).

Van de Velde's BBC debut was, though, a bit more successful than that of Virtual Spectator, a gadget, the BBC told us breathlessly in advance, that uses a global positioning satellite system to pinpoint and offer a 3-D animated image of where the ball is located on the course in relation to the hole. Tremendous. But it had an inauspicious start, failing to locate Tiger Woods' lost ball after his opening drive of the tournament.

Course marshal Terry Bennett spotted it, though, and, rumour has it, the Sun bought it from him for £8,000. Next year the Beeb should use Terry as their latest hi-tech gadget, and forget about Virtual Spectator.

Elsewhere, continued commiserations to cycling fans who have to sit up half the night, every night, to see highlights of each Tour de France stage on ITV, tucked neatly in the insomniac's schedule between repeats of Today with Des and Mel and Nash Bridges.

It's no consolation, certainly, but you're not the only sports fans whose feathers have been ruffled by the channel recently. Formula One devotees in the north of England sat through the French Grand Prix earlier this month only for an ad break to pop up during the last lap, with coverage resuming after the race had ended.

And then there was that ITV News item on the death of Cameroon footballer Marc Vivien Foe. The one where they had a picture of West Ham's Jermain Defoe up on the screen.

Back to the Open. Who should Dougie Donnelly bump into yesterday? Paul Gascoigne. Wearing a TaylorMade cap.

"'Av got some new clubs from TaylorMade an' they invited us heor, like," he told Dougie.

"You're getting a chance to see some of the best players in the world up close?"

"Aye, Garcia obviousee uses TaylorMade an' Tiger Woods an'. . ."

"Will you play again next season," said Dougie, hastily interrupting the advertisement. "Aye, withoot a doot," said Gascoigne, "'av still got clubs intristed, like."

Do you get the sinking feeling that TaylorMade are the only clubs he'll be playing with during the impending campaign? Withoot a doot.