I know, I know. I've been really critical of CFTO these past few weeks, but what happened on Friday's noon show made me watch the screen with my mouth open, asking, "what the hell was that?"

It started with the FIFA World Cup Draw story, which, while of absolutely no interest to yours truly (soccer to me is like watching paint dry, only not as interesting. But your mileage may differ) I admit this is a big story. They did a live hit with Allison Hirst at some Toronto watch party for three minutes then it was back to the studio. 

Fair enough. 

But then, they went to the live coverage from Washington, where they showed a half finished musical performance, a painful back-and-forth with Heidi Klum and Kevin Hart, which went on forever, and then back to event host and actor Danny Ramirez in the audience, where half the people were speaking Spanish without a translator. 

Now we're eight minutes into the newscast and we're still almost an hour away from the big announcement and draw. They then did a backgrounder, a story on unauthorized use of the FIFA name, a very long TSN-taped interview with former player Dwayne de Rosario and finally back to the newsroom. By now, we were 12 minutes into a one hour show, and time was ticking. And we were no closer to the actual draw, making what had come before a bit of a waste. 

They did some crime and other stories for a bit and then, about three minutes later, on comes Scott Hirst with - what else? - more World Cup set-up, and again no payoff. By this point, we're 17 minutes into a news show without much real news in it. Hirst droned on for over three minutes, followed by more news. 

But wait it didn't end there. Towards the end of the show, we were transported back to Washington, for live coverage of P.M. Mark Carney picking Canada's name out of a group of balls, the president of Mexico picking her county's name from another container, and we were about to see Donald Trump pick the final name (three guesses: it was the U.S.A,, as if the fix was not already in.) when CTV, running late, cut to a commercial break and we never saw what happened after that. 

We then went back to Danny Ramirez live who proceeded to conduct a five minute interview entirely en Espanol, with no translation. By then, the show was over and despite all that hype about finding out who was playing who this summer, the audience never did learn the answers. 

What then was the point of the entire hour? I was speechless watching this tripe. 

Look, I get it - things happen when you're going live and not everything starts or ends on time. But devoting that much time to a story that should have been five minutes long or less was a waste of viewers' time. Instead, it practically took up the whole newscast - and then didn't even get to the actual point!

I've produced and written TV news for over 25 years. I can't recall anything this pointless for viewers airing on any station. Even if you cared about the groupings, you never found out, because they had to go to Young Sheldon instead

It was a mess. Oh well. At least we got an actual weather forecast, so I guess I should be happy with that.