YOU may think the Silly Season is a myth; it’s not! The Silly Season is a curse for you, the reader and viewer; but for us, the poor saps who have to do it, it’s more of a jail sentence. I mean who ever heard of an owl that plays football? More on that later.

We dread the dead news months of late July through to early September. I would pray each year for as long a holiday, illness or family tragedy as I could wangle in those desperate weeks because it’s the time when news editors abandon all ideas of journalistic values and just grab whatever they can to fill the programme or paper.

We start from nothing, everything shuts down: councils, Parliament, courts, in fact most public institutions; the schools and colleges are empty — to walk down a university corridor in August is to redefine the term loneliness, I know I’ve done it.

But we still have our 30 minutes to fill because the schedules don’t care much which month it is. So, the Central TV newsroom, like every other I worked in, became a game of hide and seek. The toilets were unusually busy, the edit suites permanently occupied with journalists queuing up inside to avoid being seen by the news editor. If out on the road, pagers and phones would accidentally not work and the journeys to and from the job would be doubled in length.

Because we knew that news editor was looking for some sucker to do a hopeless story and it fell on our shoulders to produce two minutes of entertaining, informative viewing from zero. No dramas, crime, political shenanigans; no tragedies, triumphs or disasters, nothing which drives on a normal show through the rest of the year — except Christmas, but we all go mad in a different way then.

So that’s how I came to tell the tale of a footballing owl in the Cotswolds. The news editor had seen a local paper front page picture of an owl which its owner alleged could play football; that was all he needed. He dug me out of my hiding place, thrust it at me and said: “Two minutes, tonight, Micro! This is right up your street, you're just the man for this.”

It was a hospital pass but I had no choice so we went to meet this wholly indifferent owl which could not care less abut the football we kept putting in front of it. Magically my phone started working again and I called the office to say: “This owl does not play football, there’s nothing in it!”

“Yes it does, Micro, it says so in the paper. Get on with it!” Click!

I cursed the local paper reporter who had started all this; may they be reborn as a wounded rat in a nest of eagles! Of course, they were only doing what we were — it’s just that you get away with a staged shot in a paper, trying to drag two minutes out of a one-line joke is not so easy.

Somehow cameraman Tim Hughes managed to trick loads of shots which made it look like the owl was addressing the ball when really it was nowhere near it. I wrote a John Motson-style script and voiced it like him, full of urgency and football cliches. You could almost see the sheepskin coat.

It was far-removed from award-winning reporting but it filled a hole. . . a hole which would open up again the next day and every day after that until September. Have pity on us, it may be the Silly Season for you, for us it’s standing on the edge of insanity.