Bridget Jones's Diary and one-day internationals don't have much in common but one can help you get through the monotony of the other.
Recently, Sportal shared a lift with a great of the game who lamented about the future of ODIs.
As the conversation turned to Friday night's opening game at The Oval, the former player quipped how he could have left to see a movie and returned in time not to miss anything important.
In 92 minutes one could have sat through the trials and tribulations of Bridget Jones's love life, squeezed in a toilet break and flicked back to the cricket in time to see the climax to an otherwise non-descript game.
Such is the rhythm of 50-over cricket where each innings begins with a bang, followed by 25 overs of dross when teams milk ones and twos, before the happy hour of the last 10 overs.
Sure, that's downplaying the importance of Luke Wright, Paul Collingwood and James Hopes' medium-pacers but if sacrificing that means it'll keep the other half happy then it's a hit worth taking.
That's a slightly flippant attitude but it does highlight a problem facing the game's administrators - how to keep people interested in the 50-over game.
ODIs were once the golden child of cricket.
Though it would be extreme to brand it the game's red-headed stepchild, it now suffers middle sibling syndrome, lacking the prestige of Tests and the novelty factor of Twenty20.
The ECB's decision to scrap its 50-over domestic competition while retaining the Pro40 does not bode well for the future either.
Australia's 50-over tournament - the Ford Ranger Cup - won't meet its demise any time soon. Cricket Australia and FoxSports are locked in until 2013 and the 2015 World Cup is likely to be staged Down Under.
But how can the 50-over game regain its lustre?
The power plays, introduced earlier this decade, have helped. Prolonging them from 10 overs to, say, 20 would lessen the boredom during the middle stages.
So would putting extra juice in the wickets. Bowlers need all the help they can get in the era of short boundaries and heavy bats.
How about fewer ODIs? Australia played only 15 of them in 1988. It will play 15 between now and mid-November on three different continents.
It's an excellent example of how you can have too much of a good thing.
But less will never be more for the game's bean counters.
Channel 9 pays CA an estimated $40 million a year to broadcast the international summer and it wants full bang for its considerable buck.
The Future Tours Program is locked in until May 2012 but after that why not fixture Twenty20 and ODIs according to the stage of the World Cup cycle?
In the two years preceding the World Cup, the emphasis should be on the 50-over form, and in the two years after leading into the ICC World Twenty20 that format can take precedence.
Nobody really cares about ODIs unless the World Cup is on the horizon. Outside of the World Cup, how many of the 304 matches Australia has played since 1999 can you actually remember?
With a bad movie, you can fast forward to the good parts and skip the rest. Something similar needs to happen with ODIs.