The guests yanking the fabled balls from the fabled Perspex salad-spinner at FA headquarters yesterday were Geoff Thomas and Mark Bright. “Thanks, lads,” Sir Trevor Brooking said when the ball-yanking was done. “Some good ties there.” Well, yes, up to a point. But still, one has to ask, could they have done any better with the balls available? Middlesbrough or Sheffield United versus Cardiff City really needed to be the other way round. Same goes for Manchester United versus Portsmouth. Really, only when pulling out Barnsley versus Chelsea did Thomas and Bright produce the performance expected of guests at this level.

But let's not underestimate what's involved. Certainly Barnsley seemed to find the process complex enough. We had the traditional live picture of the players gathered round the telly. They were seventh ball out, securing a home tie. Big cheer for that, obviously. Then a tense silence. Why? There was only one ball left. You didn't need to be Hercule Poirot. Anyway, out came Chelsea. Even bigger cheer from Barnsley. Forgive them, they don't do this very often.

Afterwards, it was back to worrying about global warming. Climatologists now claim that every six months another lump falls off Ski Sunday. At the present rate of disappearance, it is estimated that Ski Sunday will have melted away entirely by 2015.

You notice the difference when you go back after a period away. I had heard, obviously, that things were critical. But I hadn't visited Ski Sunday for some time before last weekend and was shocked by what I saw when I arrived. The competitive skiing that used to be so thick and abundant in the programme had receded to a poor, solitary peak at the centre, while down below it lay mound upon mound of slush.

Yes, there was light coverage of the women's slalom from Zagreb, but even that was shot in a documentary style, with Graham Bell at the bottom of the mountain, barking above the noise of Croats with air horns. All the rest was travelogue pieces about trips to the Himalayas, with presenters going downhill and shouting “woo” and “oh, yes”. It was Wish You Were Here ...? in warmer clothes - to the point where you began to doubt that you were watching Ski Sunday at all, or even, frankly, that it was Sunday.

Whisper this, but there was even some bloke tooling around on a snowboard. A snowboard! The Devil's footwear. It would never have happened under David Vine.

But then the world of skiing was a different place when Vine roamed it. It was a place of innocence where the snow was as pure as the driven, er, snow and where you always knew that, whatever else happened, Franz Klammer would be down again in a minute, while crazed Austrians shook cowbells and yodelled in ecstasy or, possibly, in German.

There was no need then to pad out the programme by getting Bell to abseil into an icy crevasse to find out what it looked like (answer: icy). There was certainly no need to run a weekly celebrity ski challenge, in which various newsreaders and chefs slalom off against the clock. (Fiona Bruce is showing well, but I'm told you can never write off Heston Blumenthal.)

What can we do? In all honesty, it may be too late. Nevertheless, if even half of us stopped leaving our electronic appliances on standby, the BBC might be able to afford to show some proper skiing, at proper length and not hidden behind the red button where recording devices cannot reach it. As Bell said at the weekend: “It's one of the most beautiful places on earth - and it's disappearing.” He was talking about the peaks above Chamonix, but he might as well have been referring to Ski Sunday itself. This is part of our teatime heritage we're talking about. Mind you, even teatime isn't what it used to be. It's mostly coffee today.

Thus far immune to climate change, the rink for Dancing on Ice holds firm. Sad to report that, from now on, it will be providing a solid surface for other skates than those of Steve Backley. A fourth consecutive week in the bottom two proved to be one skate-off too many for the Olympic medal-winning javelin thrower and, in an arena in which he had already seen off Samantha Mumba, the Irish pop singer, Tim Vincent, the presenter, and Aggie MacKenzie, the televised cleaning lady, the “luckiest man on ice” finally succumbed to the power that is Zaraah Abrahams from Coronation Street.

When the verdict came in, Backley looked like he wanted the ice to open up and swallow him, but you have to go to the Alps for that.