I’ve got a fairly high boredom threshold. Regular readers who plough through these weekly wafflings probably do to.

But I’m not sure there is such a thing as boredom, just varying levels of fascination. Plonk me in front of, say, a brick wall for hours on end and I’ll probably become enraptured by the intricacies of the pointing instead of mournfully groaning at the crushing reality of having to sit in front of a brick wall.

By all accounts, we live in a world of decreasing attention spans. In fact, your mind has probably started to wander right there, halfway through reading the word “spans”.

And how do we know that attention spans are decreasing? Because a poll of the people said so. Apparently a recent census stated that our attentiveness has gone down from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to nine seconds now.

In a completely unrelated poll at the weekend, a survey of 2000 Mills & Boon readers concluded that 71 per cent of Scots were desperate for more excitement in their love life.

And in another bit of recent number crunching, some boffins found that a few holes of golf burns more calories than, whisper it, sex. So the conclusion of all this polling, surveying and studying? Well, those aforementioned Mills & Boon readers should just take their heart-racing notions of mild erotica down to the local golf course. But wait. Another poll roared that golf is the most boring sport to watch. You just can’t win.

Last week’s YouGov poll had to be taken with sizeable fistfuls of salt, yet once again led to golf making headlines for the wrong reasons. According to 70 per cent of UK respondents – and that number was only some 1600 it has to be said – golf is either “boring” or “very boring” to watch.

Maybe folk would have changed their tune had they been at the Sony Open on Sunday when shrieking alerts of a ballistic missile heading for Hawaii were wrongly circulated amid panic-stricken scenes?

Let’s face it, polls like this get trotted out in wild abandon and mean very little to those who know the game and appreciate the subtle nuances and its nip-and-tuck progression to a bubbling finale.

The history of this great game is littered with epic spectacles in majors or at Ryder Cups which will be forever perched in the pantheon of sport’s most venerated contests. On the other hand, of course, tournament golf is hardly a must watch all of the time. There are plenty of occasions when affairs on the course are about as action-packed as Monet’s Water Lilies. But you can say that about plenty of other sporting events.

The problem with such polls is that they are swiftly pounced upon by those keen to use the results as yet another stick with which they can give golf a flogging. Negative perceptions follow the game around like a private detective and the results of these surveys provide more drooling grist to the mill for those keen to put the boot in.

We are in an age of interaction, innovation and instant impact, where consumers now demand fast-paced, easily digestible sporting fare. Even some of the players appear to feel that way.

Speaking at last week’s EurAsia Cup, Belgium’s Thomas Pieters, who was clearly relishing the opportunity of a matchplay event to get away from the staple diet of 72-holers, stated that, “I love playing the majors and big tournaments but sometimes I can get a bit uninterested.”

Pieters is hosting this season’s Belgian Knock-Out on the European Tour, another new event which will include a nine-hole strokeplay eliminator.

The 2018 schedule now looks a bit like a page from the Innovations Catalogue with the Golf Sixes, the World Super 6 and the Shot Clock Masters also featuring as the tour ploughs on with admirable dabblings into new formats to engage new audiences.

This is all well and good, but when so few people can watch due to the lack of golf on terrestrial TV, the impact of these innovations is limited.

On Sky, you are, by and large, already preaching to the converted. And they may have high boredom thresholds . . .