EXCITING times for snooker, with HP Sauce volunteering to sponsor the brown ball at next week’s Masters and Jimmy White changing his name to Brown in honour of the deal. As they say on the fashion pages, White is the new Brown.

The player’s view is that he is merely honouring his duty to “help liven up the game’s image” and I’m sure he’s on to something. Why, there must be millions of people who, as recently as yesterday, couldn’t have given a stuff for snooker but who, after this big sauce development, cannot wait for Sunday and the sound of cues being chalked.

The people I feel sorry for, though, are the BBC, who are down to televise the Masters and for whom this HP business has opened a real can of worms in brine. The BBC has always been rigorous about defending its viewers from the pernicious and morally corrosive effect of advertising in general and of product placement in particular. Carrying the standard for this important policy, the presenters of Blue Peter historically went to enormous lengths to avoid saying the word “Sellotape” and their brave work is continued to this day in the sports department.

It is why, in the latter days of the BBC’s contract to screen the Aberdeen Asset Management Boat Race, you would hear Steve Rider refer only to “the Boat Race, sponsored by a well-known brand of financial consultant”. And it is why, even now, the Barclays Premiership is referred to on the BBC only as “the Premiership, sponsored by that well-known place in which you can store money, assuming you have any”.

But now this. White intends to dress in brown with a pale blue bow-tie, to resemble as closely as possible a bottle of sauce. So the BBC probably will have no choice but to pixelate him, the way it does with car numberplates, criminal faces and exposed genitals. A harsh fate for the Masters regular, perhaps, but he can’t say he didn’t have it coming.

This week has already brought further massive disappointment for Martin “Chariots” Offiah, who must be wondering what exactly he has to do to win a celebrity challenge show. Having failed to impress the judges in the first series of Strictly Come Dancing, rugby league’s former try-machine walked away empty-handed from Christmas’s first and second series combined dance-off.

Within days, though, Chariots had picked himself up and was back on screen in Celebrity Mastermind. But, astonishingly, the oh-so elusive victory would not come and he was defeated by Hugh Quarshie, who played Captain Panaka in 1999’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

Just by the law of averages, you assumed that Chariots might put this terrible run of form to bed and end the drought on Living TV’s I’m Famous and Frightened, in which guests of the calibre of Toyah Willcox, the former pop star, and Jono Coleman, the disc jockey, agreed to spend three nights in a spooky old house with only their celebrity for comfort. And what happens? Chariots loses out in the final reckoning to Ruth Madoc from Hi-De-Hi. Talk about the fright of his life.

It is too early to speak of a crisis, but Chariots does appear to be running out of shows. Qualifying has finished and filming is under way for Channel 4’s Extreme Celebrity Detox, the Big Brother house is closed to celebrities for at least a year and it is unlikely that we’ll see another series of I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! this side of the autumn.

The best that Offiah can do, in all likelihood, is to keep his hand in with a few supermarket openings and pray for a second series of The Farm on Five.

What was that surface they were playing on in the one-day cricket international in South Africa yesterday? Close inspection eventually revealed it to be, as billed, a cricket pitch, but early overviews had suggested something more like a golf course, with especially devious sand-traps in the square-leg region and a series of massive bunkers defending the pavilion, making club selection off the tee a critical issue.

These pictures of ravaged soil would have provided alarming viewing at any time. They were the more so for coming so soon after Saturday’s scenes of ecological depletion from the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, where divots the size of small cars were being torn up, not just by the players, but by the ball whenever it landed from a height greater than ten feet.

Factor in the penalty spot that slid out from under David Beckham in Portugal last year and it is clear that we are looking at nothing less than a worldwide earth-stability crisis, the result, almost certainly, of global warming. Pretty soon, all sport will be played in a soft, earthy hollow and appear to be an archive episode of The Wombles. How long before the developed world acts in unison on this?

Giles Smith returns on Saturday