I don’t know about you, but there are buttons on my remote control for the television which I have never pressed.

They must serve some valuable purpose but I simply have no idea what they do. But that’s fine. My tele must be at least 12 years old and the pair of us have muddled on together in a harmonious relationship in which one has never challenged the other to perform tasks out with our comfort zone.

I’m quite happy to stick to jabbing the on/off button, pawing at the channel up/down thingymebob and prodding the volume +/- whatsitsface while the TV has never encouraged me to thumb that untouched nubbin in the corner of the remote which has an elaborate icon on it that resembles a hieroglyphic in an Egyptian tomb.

Of course, the way we watch the idiot box these days is changing. Indeed, the way we watch anything is changing. Take the PGA Championship, for instance.

It was available to stream on the Eleven Sports website and it was free – as long as you remembered to cancel your free trial within seven days after going through the usual process of registering your particulars.

Prior to attempting to log on, this scribe had a scrawl on Twitter – never a good barometer for measuring reasoned reaction – and was confronted by a riot of debate. “Disgrace”, “the end of golf”, “so much for growing the game,” growled the self-appointed guardians while others responded to the harrumphing fist-shakers by lampooning their inability to actually log-on to the Eleven Sports website which, it has to be said, was fairly straight forward.

The bickering on social media was akin to watching the profit-seeking owner of a textile mill battling it out with the hand-loom weavers during the Luddite revolts. Going purely online was always going to polarise in an age when it’s easy to be left overwhelmed by the technological tsunami.

Anyone, for instance, who has struggled to scan a broccoli floret through the self-service check-out amid a torrent of hectoring about an “unexpected item” will vouch for that particular observation.

The Eleven Sports stream was far from perfect. It actually stopped working before the eventual winner, Brooks Koepka, putted for victory on the last. If Tiger Woods had been leading at that point, the world wide web would have disintegrated.

There was considerable irony about the whole situation, though. Plenty were bleating that if Woods had won, nobody would have been able to experience such a seismic event because it wasn’t on Sky. But if it was on Sky, plenty would have been grumbling that nobody could see it because it wasn’t on the BBC.

The added irony of people furiously lambasting online streaming while going online to lambast it added to the odd dynamic.

Where and how golf is viewed in the future remains an intriguing prospect. And who will actually be watching remains an area of interest too as golf tries to lure in a younger audience.

A couple of years ago, at an industry conference, one of Sky’s heid bummers stated that only five per cent of the satellite broadcaster’s golf viewers were under 25. Sky’s average viewer was, rather predictably, a 57-year-old white male. One can’t imagine that statistic has changed much.

More recently, on a top-10 list of BBC viewing figures, July’s Open highlights was eighth, between an old Dad’s Army episode and a jaunty fishing programme starring two ageing comedians.

Where does the interest lie? At 42, Tiger Woods still pushes the proverbial needle. Golf has many stars but none of them have the pulling power of Woods. Koepka’s calm, powerful majesty was, in many ways, overshadowed by the tumult surrounding Tiger while the resurgent Adam Scott, who ran Koepka extremely close, was relegated to a mere footnote amid the hysteria.

Woods is not going to be around forever, despite his almost superhuman powers of recovery. Who does golf turn to after that? How will we be tuning in? And, given the game’s worrying demographic, will we be simply turning off? Pass me the remote ...

AN ANOTHER THING

It’s a game for all the ages. But not as far as the Scotland selectors are concerned.

Euan McIntosh, who won the Scottish Amateur Championship at the age of 49 the other week and followed it up by winning the Leven Gold Medal on Sunday, has not been included in the three-man team for September’s Eisenhower Trophy.

McIntosh has shown his worth over the last couple of seasons on the amateur front but no doubt failed to tick a variety of elaborate boxes in the convoluted selection policy document.