All that passion for athletics that we television viewers found in ourselves during the Olympics - it can’t have just disappeared out of the back door of the Bird’s Nest on board Boris Johnson’s magic bus, can it? We’re not just going to forget it until 2012, surely? We couldn’t be that fickle.

Or could we? In the context, the Aviva British Grand Prix at Gateshead became a four-hour opportunity, provided by the BBC, to demonstrate that the thing between us and athletics wasn’t merely a summer fling - that it goes much deeper than that. Even if there’s football on the other side.

It was also a handy, fast-turnaround Olympic reunion for anyone still suffering the pangs of withdrawal. Hazel Irvine was present, exchanging the Beijing smog for the not visibly different Tyneside fog. Colin Jackson honoured us with his presence, as did Brendan Foster. Also on board were Stuart Storey and Paul Dickenson and, by the sandpit, Jonathan Edwards - the voices that echoed through our homes during that golden August fortnight.

And yet, how to put this? It wasn’t quite the same. Reunions so rarely are. Blame the weather, if you like - the tipping rain, the three-feet visibility - although that was never a hindrance in Beijing.

So maybe it was the lack of an opening ceremony. Can you believe that? Here was Gateshead’s chance to open itself up, at last, to a curious world and make an emphatic statement about where it stands on the 21st-century global stage.

Yet the opportunity was passed up. Not so much as one Gateshead-trained drummer hid in a wicker picnic hamper for the now statutory seven hours before bursting out to take part in a formidable and actually, when you thought about it, quite sinister display of discipline and precision.

For our homecoming Olympians, of course, it was back to the daily grind. If you’re an athlete, these events are your bread and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. But what if you’re a viewer? Sunday afternoon television may offer few sights less invigorating than that of a dripping crowd in hooded raintops gamely clashing wet thundersticks for a damp bronze medal-winner. Poor Tasha Danvers - cold, wet and, incidentally, third again.

Over at the triple jump, Phillips Idowu worked the spectators hard, the sandpit less so. The Olympic hair, the headband, the jewellery - they were all in place. Only the Olympic jumping was absent, making the event seem like an enhanced autograph-signing session, a public appearance, rather than a public performance.

But then, right at the point where one might plausibly have been on the verge of giving up and finding out how Aston Villa were getting on, something extraordinary happened. Asafa Powell, who was doomed, in Beijing, to play the Perry Como to Usain Bolt’s Frank Sinatra, ripped off the plastic bag with which he had been unstylishly protecting his head and ran the 100 metres in a blistering 9.87sec - which was astonishing, when you consider that the track was so wet that he was technically wading for the first 40 metres or so. Athletics: they’re not just for the Olympics, you know.

The weekend’s other great homecoming occurred on Gladiators - The Legends Return on Sky One. In this special edition of television’s leading rubberised pro-celebrity smackdown, the 2008 cast were pitted against the original gladiatorial heroes of the 1990s - some of the greatest athletes ever to poke each other with plastic sink-plungers. How the years fell away. Was that Ace? It was. And blow me down if that wasn’t Wolf. I thought he was extinct.

Comparisons were bound to be made. The new breed of Gladiator is undoubtedly younger, and quite possibly firmer, but nowhere near as famous. I don’t think it is controversial to point out that the present, revived series has yet to produce its Hunter, or even, frankly, its Flame, a competitor whose name effortlessly comes to the lips whenever the business of wearing knee-pads and monkeying around on crash mats is spoken of.

The new guys - Enigma, Oblivion, Broadband, Paracetamol (I may be muddling some of these) - are doing their best. But for those in pursuit of a place in the nation’s heart, the world has never been more competitive and it may be time to admit, however reluctantly, that it takes a bit more these days than oiling up your pectorals and spending a few teatimes knocking someone off a floodlit perch.

The contest with the legends, accordingly, couldn’t help but feel one-sided, irrespective of the individual, head-to-head outcomes in the arena.

In any case, the night’s biggest struggle turned out to be Ian Wright, the presenter, trying to say, “in the eliminator relay” and getting horribly mangled in a terrifying pile-up of flailing vowels and spinning consonants. Welcome, if you will, a new, awesomely powerful legend to the Gladiator pantheon: Autocue.