Hamish Champ: Who needs footy on the pub telly when there's a riot goin' on?

I never watch televised sport in pubs as a rule. I might latch onto a game of football or rugby if a pub I'm in is showing one, but I haven't made a bee-line to a boozer specifically because, say, it's showing a Chelsea match (I know, I know) for ages.

But last week I was spellbound by stuff beng shown on the telly in a pub near the Publican​'s offices. It wasn't the cricket, or rugby, or a re-run of some Division One encounter. It was the rioting in London.

As is usually the case with pubs showing a news channel during the day, the pub in question had the sound turned down and the subtitles for the hard of hearing well and truly on.

But whereas usually only one or two colleagues would find themselves diverted from in-the-pub conversations about what this or that pubco or brewery has been up to, on this occasion nothing could compete with the footage of the demonstration over university fees being transmitted via the God of All Things Televisual that is Sky News onto the various flat screen TVs dotted about the pub.

Students rioting about how bad the state of their lot is always good for a laugh at the best of times. But let's face it; we haven't had a decent knees up since that poll tax shin-dig in Trafalgar Square near the end of Thatcher's time in office. I mean, it's good to know people still care about these things. Isn't it?

Anyway, Sky News' non-stop coverage of various young scamps - most of them masked - threatening the Mother of Parliament and her protectors with steel poles, bricks and other assorted weaponry held us transfixed.

Overhead cameras, presumably bolted to helicopters, caught every tidal wave of disgruntled 'under-graduates' surging forward, seeking to press home their 'point' that expecting students to cough up thousands of pounds for their own education was something for which they would not jolly well stand. It also caught the robust response of the Boys In Blue to such efforts.

As the sound wasn't switched on we couldn't tell if the commentary accompanying the images of mayhem and disorder was balanced or whether, like Fox News, Sky's sister news organisation in the US, it was pro-establishment and very much anti- the types hurling large objects in the direction of MPs and those chaps dressed in fluorescent jackets tasked with the job of ensuring said scamps didn't break through the numerous cordons.

Yet this, for me, was a side issue. What was fascinating was that for the first time in positively ages a pub was showing a live news broadcast for at least three hours. Everyone was enraptured. Yet why wouldn't we be? It was mesmeric stuff. And that it was all happening a mile and a half away from both the pub we were all in and the Publican​'s offices made it all the more… interesting.

We weren't the only people in the pub who were staring at the screens, unable to wrench our eyes away from what was going on.

It may not have been football or the Ashes, and true, I don't think it'll catch on, but as a televised event in a pub went, it was gripping stuff.