You may think that it is a cushy job, lounging on a sofa, a table stacked high with chocolate bars in front of you, watching live football on the television. And, well, it is.

Who wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of Lee Dixon and Gavin Peacock as they nod at a chap sitting to attention to their right, who maps out the times of the significant action whenever they see an incident they think they may want to look at again. They made the odd note as they watched West Ham United’s Sunday afternoon match against Sunderland, but so few that whenever they did languidly scribble, I shouted: “What did you spot there, then?” Peacock said: “Oh, just a run that Kenwyne Jones made.”

Peacock has decided that Jones’s performance may be worth highlighting, as the tall striker will need to score 12-15 goals this season if Sunderland are to stay up. And what happens? Jones does score and although Sunderland lose, he plays so well that over on Sky Sports they decide that he is man of the match.

Peacock manages not to look too smug. Dixon, though, is more emotionally demonstrative. He decides early on that he wants to analyse the way Sunderland undermine all their positive work with defensive errors. This will sound so much better if they concede three goals, but the game looks stuck at 1-1. “Come on, West Ham,” he shouts.

When West Ham finally wake up and score two late goals, Dixon cheers loudly. “I like it when a plan comes together,” he says. Cosy little number, I think. Peacock reads my thoughts and looks stern. “It’s hard work now,” he says as he makes his way to the editing suite.

Match of the Day 2 is part cult television, part essential viewing for football fans. Mark Demuth, the programme’s editor, says that he has anecdotal evidence that the show is popular with people who quite like football rather than die-hard fans, so he has to keep the know-alls happy and entertain those who cannot name a single West Ham player.

This he does by employing as presenter Adrian Chiles, who is not a former professional player but a fan who travels far and wide to watch West Bromwich Albion and admits to being obsessed. “If Adrian understands what we explain is happening, then the chances are the viewers at home will get it, too, because he’s a fan,” Dixon says.

“I’m the idiot filter,” Chiles says. The tough part of their job seems to be training the brain to handle a wall of 14 television screens. On a couple of them, Lewis Hamilton is busy not winning the Formula One World Championship. They all decide that Peacock is now in with a shout of becoming the BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Chiles jokes that when a match is really boring, their eyes are drawn to Songs of Praise on the screen to the bottom left of the display.

Come February they will be shocked to see Peacock, a “committed Christian”, there because he is hosting an edition of the programme. Peacock earmarked media work early on in his football career and after a stint on radio was given his big break when the BBC asked him to work on its coverage of the African Cup of Nations. Peacock had a more complicated route than most other BBC pundits, who have more glamorous on-screen captions than Peacock’s “633 career appearances”.

“I knew I had to be good because I’ve not captained my country,” he says. “I try to be honest, to give opinion backed with reasons. It’s about highlighting things that aren’t obvious to the people at home.”

Go on, admit it, your favourite part of Match of the Day 2 is the “2 good, 2 bad” feature. I was looking forward enormously to witnessing how the funny bits of the weekend’s action are compiled. I entered yet another room with stacks of screens and Chiles sat down to be shown what had been pieced together. There seemed only to be shot after shot of fans with weight problems and in the present climate, with the Beeb keen to offend nobody, these were reluctantly ditched.

But all afternoon Chiles had been talking about Rafael Benítez’s red tongue. Gary Lineker had, on a previous show, pointed out that the Liverpool manager looked odd, but Chiles ignored those who reminded him of this and decided that if you stare long enough at a man who appears to have been gargling blood, something previously not noted will appear. Sure enough, Chiles spotted a moment when BenÍtez put his hands to his head as if he was making horns with his fingers and a joke about the devilish BenÍtez is born.

I peered over Chiles’s shoulder as he wrote the script for his overview of Saturday’s action. Initially I was disappointed. It was routine stuff; routine, that is, until he read it out. His delivery is wonderful and he turned ordinary football phrases into sardonic masterpieces. In the live show, a timing error was handled with such watchable ease by Chiles that you half-wonder if the backroom staff trip him up on purpose. The real star, though, was the football and in particular the “unplayable” Jones. And that, of course, is as it should be.

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