"Now what are we going to do?" said Porky Withers in the long slow silence that fell on Monday night. We stared glumly at the darkened television set. When a television set has been switched off, it is as sad and empty as a piece of contemporary art.

On Monday night, our television could have won the Turner Prize. The world outside the Chalk 'n Cue seemed suddenly cold and hollow and littered with the empty, chitinous shells - like so many second-hand prawns in a Mozambican pub - of dreams sucked dry and allowed to slip carelessly to the sawdust floor.

Does this seem melodramatic to you? Ah, but we are sensitive souls, down at the Chalk 'n Cue. We are attuned to the void. The void, as any good existentialist will tell you, if you can persuade them to stop drinking long enough to speak, is what remains when there is no more South African sport on television. "Now what are we going to do?" said Porky Withers again.

"Maybe we should hang ourselves," suggested Sad Henry.

"We have no rope," said Big Bob Plummer. "And anyway, we're waiting for a pizza."

We sat in more silence. When all hope has been snuffed from your bosom, there is not a lot to talk about. "I blame Lance Klusener," said Porky Withers after a while. We shrugged and stirred our drinks with our fingers. Most of us agreed, but we were long past debates on causality. The void was upon us and pulling us under, and the void, oh my friends, has long and sticky tentacles.

I knew we must fill the hole in our lives left by South Africa's exit from the World Cup, or surely we would be lost to despair and dissolution, but it would not be easy. For the past month I have been a slave to the Supersport channels, a martyr to the World Cup, an unsleeping, hairshirt-wearing supplicant before the giggling gods of sport. So pure has been the flame of my devotion that I have suffered uncomplaining through the rash of World Cup advertisements that descend on us like a plague of boils.

I have smiled benignly at those endless LG ads in which, so far as I can gather, a suburban family's TV set becomes demonically possessed by a cricket team wearing lilac. Quite why the family is watching a cricket team playing in lilac while the rest of us are watching the World Cup I have left unquestioned.

I have survived those Nandos commercials that boast the extraordinary achievement of having found a Suze Orman imitator even more irritating than Suze Orman herself. To be honest, though, I have not always curbed my impatience with the Mica adverts in which a man rather unconvincingly watches cricket in the living-room while his wife paints the hallway wall. "When you have to do it yourself!" says the voice-over.

"Oh please!" I found myself yelling on Monday night, as the tension began to build. "Who needs to paint a wall right this minute? Why can't she wait until the dinner break? He'll be happy to help then. Or tomorrow? Why does she need the wall painted tonight?"

That is always how I know that I am becoming too involved in what is happening on my television: when I start yelling at DIY adverts. So I had to find something to fill the void this week, but I was wary. Traditional sports have not been kind of late. Traditional sports, if you really want to know, have been jostling among themselves to be next in line to poke me in the eye with a crooked forefinger. So I decided to try something different.

"What's this we're watching?" demanded Sad Henry. "This, my brothers," I announced, "is the Super Retriever Series." And it was. The Super Retriever Series (DSTV; ESPN; Tuesday) was just the thing. It was sport, of a sort, but not the kind of sport that could ever break my heart.

The Super Retriever Series, brought to us from Missoula County, Montana, USA, was a glorious showcase of hicks and their dogs. The hicks wore plaid shirts and duck-hunting hats with woolly ear-flaps.

The dogs wore an air of dignified resignation. In the first event, a hick stands at the end of a pier beside a soup-coloured pond. The hick holds a rubber chicken. His dog, crazed with lust or perhaps hatred for the rubber chicken, runs like billy-o down the pier toward him. At the last moment, far from greeting his best friend with a scratch behind the ear and a friendly chomp of the chicken, the hick hurls the rubber fowl into the air. The dog - oh trusting beast - never fails to fall for this low Dixie trick. The hick wins whose dog jumps furthest into the pond.

We watched in heavy silence as Daisy June soared through the air. "Twenty-three feet!" yelled a commentator. "Wow! You could put a cape on her and call her Superman!" There was a pause, broken only by the distinctive sounds of Daisy June doggy-paddling to the pier with a rubber chicken in her mouth, hoping against hope that this would be the last time.

"Don't you mean 'Superdog', Dan?" asked his fellow commentator.

"No, Don, I mean Superman," said Dan firmly. "Because Superman could fly."

"So could Superdog," said Don.

"Don, I've never even heard of Superdog," said Dan with an air of dangerous finality.

We looked at each other, down in the Chalk 'n Cue, and deep inside our hearts began to lift. However futile our lives, we had never paid money to watch a hick in a hat holding a rubber chicken to fool his dog. The void is with everyone, with hicks and cricket fans and everyone in between.

The only difference is how we choose to fill it. "Hey," said Porky Withers. "Doesn't rugby season start this weekend?"