I refuse to pay for advanced TV packages, here in Abu Dhabi.

I could say it’s a matter of principle — I will not pay outrageous rates just to see all the Arabian Gulf League soccer — but it’s mostly about two concepts:

–Not being able to get ESPN, at any price;

–Not being interested in 99 percent of other available programming.

A week ago, that changed for the better. And for worse.

A co-worker somehow came to have two cable boxes, with a card allowing the viewer to watch beIN sports (Al Jazirah sports’s new name), and beIN has about two-thirds of all serious soccer leagues) as well as Fox Sports, which has a fairly wide selection of U.S. stuff.

So, I bought the box and card from the coworker at a discounted rate, and now I have some sports options for the next five months or so.

I also have hundreds of other channels, which seem to include every Arabic-language station from here to Tunisia, as well as lowbrow stuff from various eastern European and central Asian outposts.

To click through them, as I did out of curiosity, was to be impressed by how bad this programming is, and just how much of it there is.

Some of it is people shouting at each other; some of it is ancient soap operas; some of it is TV evangelists with heroic beards; some of it is overtly patriotic on the behalf of countries not this one.

Movies in black and white. Military parades. Variety shows. Orchestras from bygone days sawing away at a sappy song in a minor key.

It is spectacularly awful. And it could only be worse if I understood Arabic. Or Polish. Or Turkish or Kurdish, Urdu and Hindi.

Now, it is possible I’ve had that stuff all along, and found out about it because the new cable box randomly arranges stations, making it nearly impossible to find out what is on without the hard work of clicking through the whole of it.

I am impressed that so much really bad television is available here. It is as if someone collected every bit of wretched TV produced over the past 75 years and assembled it for viewing here in Abu Dhabi. I imagine if I had kept looking someone would have a translated version of Hello, Larry.

(We offer up this outdated TV Guide list of the 50 worst American TV shows; in case the people who own the stations we get in Abu Dhabi missed anything. My Mother the Car would fit right in.)