Cristiano Ronaldo thrown into Jonathan Ross’s Large Ego Collider - extremely damp squib results

The one thing that is keeping me from installing a particle accelerator in the back garden is the danger – real or otherwise – that the force of two atoms colliding may produce a black hole, sucking in the surrounding area.

Dave next door probably wouldn’t appreciate his greenhouse and collection of Elvis records being hurled into oblivion. And I would certainly rather not be responsible for time and gravity flexing uncontrollably and thus rendering life impossible – or at least screwing up the trains.

So imagine my fear when I heard that two of the world’s most monstrous egos were about to be thrown together in a single television studio.

Would the collision of Jonathan Ross and Cristiano Ronaldo end the world of light entertainment as we know it? Would the crash of two shiny, big-headed men be louder and heavier than the opening chords of a Monolord song? Would we end up with a tiny, quivering televisual strangelet, a piece of dark matter so mysterious that nobody knows what it does?

In a word, no. Just as the boffins in charge of the Large Hadron Collider moved to allay fears of the world turning itself inside out when they turned on their machine, the meeting of the impeccably coiffured pair of Ronaldo and Ross resulted in a squib damper than a dishcloth.

Ronaldo displayed himself to be self-deprecating (up to a point) and willing to put up with Ross’s repeated attempts to get a rise out of him by mentioning Lionel Messi (“We’re fine,” Ronaldo said, “not friends in each other’s home, but we respect each other”) but we didn’t actually learn that much. It was highlighted by the number of times Ronaldo began an answer with the words: “As I have said many times...”

And when Ross did attempt to get under the footballer’s skin, with questions about his son’s lack of a mother figure or his own relationship with his father, Ronaldo clammed up like an oyster guarding a particularly large pearl. In place of insight we got clips of his hagiographical documentary.

There was just a glimpse of Ronaldo’s mask slipping when Ross asked whether there was a significant other in the Real Madrid player’s life. “A few...” Ronaldo said. “Some of them know about the others.”

And later in the show, when the actor David Tennant joined him on the sofa, dressed in a checked suit, Ronaldo showed a knack for comic timing. “Unbelievable,” was Ronaldo’s reaction. “In a good way or a bad way?” Tennant asked. “In a good way, of course,” Ronaldo replied with a laugh.

But apart from those fleeting moments, the guest’s patter was as polished as his face. Him mentioning with a grin that he was the best in the world was funny once. By the third time it was tiresome.

We should be thankful that Ronaldo got a word in edgeways, given Ross’s proclivity for solipsistic sentences. Unlike many guests on the Ross sofa over the years, at least the footballer was given a chance to talk. It is just a shame that the words coming out were not exactly earth-shaking.