The former international footballer Ian Wright has announced he will no longer be offering his sage and level-headed analysis of England performances for the BBC because it has just occurred to him that the corporation treats him as “a comedy jester”. This notion has deeply shocked him; clearly he thought he was there as a sort of footballing Immanuel Kant and that Lawro or Hansen were there for the belly laughs. Anyway, he will no longer be doing the gig and has instead found himself a programme where his intellectual gravitas will be properly appreciated – Gladiators, which he will be co-presenting with Roger Scruton. Or maybe Kirsty Gallacher. One of the two.

Wrighty aimed a couple of grenades in the direction of BBC Sport’s presentation of football, which he implied was old-fashioned and that modern viewers could not relate to it any more, all those men in suits pontificating. I like Ian Wright; he seems a cheerful and uncomplicated soul. I particularly enjoyed his brush with the law when he was accused of racially abusing a traffic warden. A black man hauled before a court for calling a black man a “monkey” seems to me a wonderful apogee of absurdity. I was once censured by a newspaper for using the word “monkey” to describe someone I was writing about; it’s racist, I was told. “But the person I’m writing about is white,” I complained. “Yes, but people might think that he’s black,” came the reply. Marvellous stuff.

But is he right, Wrighty? It seems to me he could not be more wrong and that the only problem with the BBC’s coverage of football, and of sport in general, is when it attempts to get too modern. For example, while one applauds the Beeb’s modernist commitment to redress the gender balance on Match of the Day by employing the world’s first female commentator, Jacqui Oatley, I go scurrying to the kitchen with my hands over my ears whenever the ball approaches the penalty area. At these moments, when the tension mounts, Jacqui’s voice rises in pitch and she begins to sound like a Dalmatian undergoing an abdominal operation without anaesthetic. In the end her voice reaches a level quite beyond human perception and, in the backyards of the nation, dogs begin to howl in response. But perhaps this is just my inherent sexism and she will simply take a bit of getting used to. That said, I’d have no objection to the excellent Gabby Logan commentating, even though she’s Terry Yorath’s daughter and I never, ever want to be reminded of Terry Yorath.

Otherwise, Match of the Day – when it’s Lineker, Lawro and Hansen, at least – is still extraordinarily good, an oasis of intelligence in a game dominated by rank stupidity. Hansen is wonderfully acute, a fine reader of the game and possessed of a wit so dry you could use it for kindling. The only mystery is why he never became a manager. The format has settled back into shape, too, after a misconceived period when, in order to address the attention-deficit syndrome of the audience, they showed clips of games as trailers for the clips of games they were about to show two minutes later. This always left me confused, not knowing whether I was watching a trailer clip or the game itself. The trailer clips, for reasons I never grasped, always seemed to involve Kevin Davies of Bolton Wanderers kicking someone. Right now, though, the programme is on very good form.

Nor will our understanding of why England have just lost at home 3-0 to the Gilbert and Ellis Islands be too gravely diminished by the removal of Wright from our sets. I enjoyed his patriotism and fervour but the viewer would receive more insight and analysis from a plate of Wensleydale cheese. And the cheese would probably be less inclined to heap praise upon a certain scampering and often ineffectual England winger. Wrighty will not be missed too much. In broader terms, though, when the BBC plays it straight during international games, which it does most of the time, its coverage is better by a country mile than its rivals. The occasional modernist tendency to employ as a pundit a good-looking foreigner who speaks not a word of English is my only bone of contention. When England are losing to the Gilbert and Ellis Islands I do not want some hirsute swarthy hunk sniggering in the background and offering his observation that “eet ees not good for, how you say, Inglan”. But perhaps this is just my inherent xenophobia coming to the fore.

Far better the men in suits pontificating than that sack of Scots pine sawdust Andy Gray stating the bleeding obvious for 90 minutes and, in the end, blaming it all on the referee. Or, for that matter, Richard Keys, who asks questions of such mind-numbing banality that he makes Wright sound like Wittgenstein.

The tendency among sports producers is to reduce commentary to the sort of thing I hear every other week at the Den, when Brkovic has just missed another open goal. A prolonged howl of abuse, in other words, entirely bereft of explanation. The BBC has so far managed to resist this temptation, the notion that fans want the input of the common man on the terraces. Believe me, we can provide that ourselves, Wrighty.