Marina Hyde talks boxing - AGAIN!

It is the year 2034. As rightly predicated by any number of late 20th-century Hollywood movies, TV's highest-rated show is a brutal physical contest. Entitled The Only Way is Boxing, the show is the brainspawn of Sir Frank ******, who in the early 2010s graduated from the long-since-forgotten discipline of boxing promotion to running a legal idiot-fighting ring, stoked by a variety of enhanced or entirely confected plot lines.

His switch was inspired by the Buffoonics in Munich, a press conference brawl that would later be immortalised in the critically acclaimed socio-sporting documentary When We Weren't Kings. This new sport-o-tainment genre so captured the public's imagination that boxing fans for ever lost their appetite for watching the most skilled athletes square up to each other for recognised titles – just as erstwhile football lovers had given up watching Barcelona in favour of reheated episodes of Sky One's Dream Team, and former drama buffs had transferred their allegiance from intricately plotted thrillers to the engrossing sub-realities of Police, Camera, Action.

Maybe. But on the balance of probabilities, maybe not. Yet news that the banned Dereck Chisora will fight the retired David Haye in July has once again provoked boxing's doomsayers into the grimmest of forecasts as to the sport's future.

Admittedly, there is the odd dark portent. Thanks to European freedom of trade laws, the fight will take place at Upton Park, having been licensed by the Luxembourg Boxing Federation, and there are those who see that as a smack in the teeth for the British Boxing Board of Control. Certainly a beer bottle to the face.

Meanwhile, others have been moved to call for the smelling salts after ****** failed to deploy their favoured clichés – the sweet science, for instance, or that noble art – in favour of the outrageous admission that his man (Chisora) was in it for the money. Somehow, Frank managed to conduct a series of interviews on his inevitable bit of chutzpah without once citing boxing's role in the civil rights movement or implying that showing kids how to do it was an adequate substitute for coherent policies to tackle structural social inequality.

And so to Tuesday's press conference trailing The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg Presents Two Plonkers Fighting For Cash. At this event, the two parties were separated by a wire fence that would have looked an embarrassing affectation even within the context of World Wrestling Entertainment, the ratings behemoth established by former US boxing promoter Vince McMahon to tap into an undoubted appetite for faux sport and outrageous plot lines. Still, it felt apt.

After all, ever since Munich there have been endless suggestions that Haye and Chisora's scuffle and subsequent truculence over assisting the German police with their inquiries was so stagily delivered as to be worthy – or unworthy – of WWE. Many WWE elements were there – key action taking place outside the ring, for instance, and Chisora's nice line in unconvincing mawkishness. "I have let my family, my team, and worst of all the sport I love down," he claimed. Haye upped his previous game – his little toe plot line would have been thrown out by some McMahon underling at the first script meeting – and tweeted pictures of himself flying off to Vegas. If not quite WWE then it was boxing's version of structured reality, the term used to describe cultural offerings such as The Only Way is Essex and Made in Chelsea, wherein real people deliver unconvincing "ad libs" in excruciatingly contrived settings. Has trailblazing Frank ****** sniffed that this is the direction in which the sport formerly known as boxing is headed too? That diagnosis seems a little premature. Given the uninspiring boredom of the Klitschko era, secessionist spectacles were always going to emerge. The Ukrainians' inelegant dominance has combined with a lack of decent opposition to create an offering marginally less exciting than punching tickets. But it needn't always be thus.

Whether Luxembourg's involvement is quite the terminal challenge to British Boxing's authority it is being cast as is also doubtful. In its insistence on seceding from the local authority and deferring to a more laissez-faire continental one, ******'s enterprise takes on a flavour of Passport to Pimlico, the classic Ealing comedy which sees the London district throw off the constrictions of authority and kick up a storm – briefly – before inevitably returning to the fold.

This, one suspects, will be the way of things for British boxing, for all the doom currently being spouted. After all, real sports fans don't want to see crap sport to the exclusion of any better offerings. A lot of them don't mind a bit of novelty from time to time, and the Haye-Chisora fight will certainly offer that. But long term, it is up to the sport to come up with something more entertaining, as opposed to trying to make an art form of fights not happening.

If boxing isn't up to that task, then perhaps Frank ******'s audacious move really will kill the British fight game as we know it, and he will soon be hiring script executives to come up with the plot lines to keep his repurposed version of the sport on the boil. If so, we shall have to make our peace with the fact that many once-valued lines of work come to a natural end. Indeed, as someone informed thrice-daily that their own industry is on its last legs, I shall be grateful to retrain in the hope of consideration for Frank's writers' room.