“He’s such a good bowler,” said the batsman later and though that is indubitable there was also the sense that here was a player who knew it took a good bowler to get him out. The only one she didn’t ask was why a once-brilliant athlete who has maintained his superb physique and spends five or six hours a day on the golf course has such an irredeemable swing.From the forced good humour on the way to the club, through a painful silence at the mention of his children and a jittery denial of murder, to the insane stunt with a banana which rounded off the show, the wild instability was never more than a moment away. Not so Ruby Wax, who, as someone pointed out shortly before her meeting with O J Simpson (BBC1), had spent her entire career preparing for this moment.It was the performance of a lifetime. The right questions, asked at the right time, including the Big One, and some dumbfounding one-liners sprinkled through her tour of Simpson’s daily routine. He stared his finest hour in the face but his courage failed him. Jimmy’s ability to play like a god one day and a mere mortal the next will probably remain a mystery forever, but for those of us who regard him as simply the finest sportsman – in every sense of the word – that we have, the tournament was as good as over the moment he started to put away his cue on Wednesday night.Jimmy had his chances, of course, most of all when he was in among the balls in the deciding frame of the final four years ago. The one impersonation he could never carry off, sadly, was of “serious contender”.He does not seem to do them any more, probably because the generally robotic new generation of snooker players has very little to latch on to.

A shame, because a little light relief was required once White and then O’Sullivan (who looks more like the fourth Gallagher brother with every passing year) had fallen by the wayside. Sale showed a good deal of spirit but they were not being driven by the fanatical Shed, whose vocal support redefines the phrases “silver tongued” and “golden voiced”.Their exhortations were rewarded as their heroes harried their way upfield and hooker Neil McCarthy wriggled through a maze of bodies to set up Mark Mapletoft with a conversion in front of the posts. His Alex Higgins was quite good, and so too his Terry Griffiths. And while events at Kingsholm were anything but pedestrian from start to finish, there was not a lot of Sale traffic to be seen breaching the home precincts.It was a match to set the pulses pounding. In Dougie Donnelly they have the unthinking man’s Des Lynam, ideal for the two-minute interlude between frames, while the sometimes dubious idea of the player-turned- pundit gains much credibility from the efforts of Dennis Taylor and John Virgo.Both, of course, have milked the Crucible applause in their time, even though in Virgo’s case it was only for his party-piece impersonations between matches.

The Sky versus terrestrial argument is a complicated one, but when an event lasts all day every day for a fortnight, and you know that Sky Sports would give it blanket coverage, it is hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy for the satellite side of the debate.When they actually find space for it, though, the BBC coverage is admirable, as well it should be after so many years of practice. But at least the schedulers were shrewd enough to realise that live coverage was essential, and anything else would have brought an angry mob of snooker fans to the gates, wielding their cues in a rather unpleasant manner. Apart from one channel switch, which raised the blood pressure to dangerous levels for two agonising minutes, not a pot was missed.Other players, including Doherty, the defending champion, were not considered worthy of equal treatment. The second session of Doherty’s semi-final with Mark Williams was desperately tight, with several black-ball frames, but somehow being forced to follow it on Teletext removed a little of the excitement. White versus O’Sullivan is the only snooker match in which you can be fairly sure that the mid-session interval will last longer than the four frames either side.