IT’S a “free country” but, as you will have learned from this column in recent weeks, you must not say anything even remotely negative about Chelsea without causing great upset.

There are other things that national convention demands us to like – or else! You can feel like an alien in your own country if you do not agree to adore Ant and Dec, Gregg’s sausage rolls, “Glasto”, Larry the Downing Street cat, Christmas jumpers and the county of Cornwall.

And woe betide anybody who suggests that Strictly Come Dancing, the same show that was on last year and the year before that, might have run its course.

In a secret speakeasy, I run a sweepstake on which year Strictly Come Dancing will end. I mean all shows end in the end, don’t they? So what’s it to be: 2025? 2040? 2100?

It’s 20 years old already without hardly having to change the formula, so this thing could run and run. Imagine, it is the year 2500: Tess Daly is thawed from a BBC cryogenic lab because… it’s MOVIE WEEK. They were meant to go to Blackpool next week but the palace ballroom has long since been lost to rising sea levels; the Reading Hexagon can still be reached by row boat, so remember, keeeeep dancing!

Whenever I suggest that this programme might be slightly repetitive, the response is often: Well, your football is the same week in, week out. That’s a ridiculous counter-offensive. Sometimes the red team wins. Sometimes the blue team wins. The possibilities are never-ending.

If you don’t know where this column is going by the way, then you were breaking the high sheriff order that you must watch “Strictly” – a shorthand just as irritating as “Corrie” – every Saturday night.

For suddenly, a hero emerged. Arriving on a gold Gooner cannon and dressed in red and white, Tony Adams superbly ripped up the relentless monotony of our tiresome Saturday evening institution.

He even dropped in his own meme, which most of the rinses glued to their SCD monitors probably didn’t even realise: a callback to the comical rotating arms he was filmed doing while running training sessions in Granada.

In turning the whole thing into an Arsenalfest, Adams, our forever captain, trolled everybody watching it. It was a masterpiece. To think Teddy Sheringham, the Spurs icon, disguised himself as a haunted tree and Glenn Hoddle dressed as a Grandfather clock in unsuccessful attempts to win The Masked Singer on the other channel.

Adams had no reason to hide his face, in contrast. Always a winner, for two minutes, he forced our nation to listen to “1-0 to the Arsenal”.