Post by Macmoish on Nov 7, 2010 8:30:05 GMT
To confess: I've seen none of them
GUARDIAN - Scott Murray
\The Joy of Six: Football documentaries
From that Graham Taylor film to Jimmy McGovern's Hillsborough here are half-a-dozen great documentaries and docu-dramas
1) City! (1981)
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Here's Manchester City bunging vast sums of money after new players, only to find them not delivering at all. It's 1980, and after an £8m investment in their playing staff, City are rooted to the bottom of the First Division. Their manager Malcolm Allison had coached City to title glory in the late 1960s and very early 70s, but by this point, those days seemed a very long time ago. Especially when champions Liverpool turned up at Maine Road and delivered a hellish spanking. "It was a bad goal," a ratty Allison moaned, when journalists talked up a Kenny Dalglish strike. "It's gone in the net at about two miles per hour. How can that be a good goal from 20-odd yards? [Pinteresque pause, as grim acceptance sets in] The third goal was a good goal …"
Serendipity plays a big part in making a great documentary, and Granada's crew found itself in the right place at the right time. Allison is soon sacked – a decision he takes with surprising grace, given his bullish reputation for china-shop bothering, warmly bidding his farewells to each and every member of staff – and replaced with John Bond, who swans into Maine Road and charms the City board with a very strange interview. As he speaks, one board member sucks hard on a fag, staring into the world's biggest ashtray. The chairman Peter Swales sits idly by, flicking a book of matches into the air from the edge of the boardroom table. "I ain't going to have people who are going about and, excuse the expression, pissing about and sort of flouting the image of Manchester City about, I don't think that's right," promises Bond, esoterically. Somehow, the speech goes down a treat. "I came prepared to be a little disillusioned," says one board member, his attitude a glove-like fit for the club he's serving, "but I'm very impressed with him."
Allison moves to Crystal Palace, and the two teams are drawn together in the FA Cup. After City win the tie, Bond offers his opinion of his predecessor – a former team-mate at West Ham – in a spectacular post-match press conference. "I think if you could get somebody who was big enough to control him and run him and be connected with him, I think you could be really, really successful," he says. "But I tell you what, you have to really have somebody who can control him. Because there is absolutely no doubt he has the ability and the capacity to make players better. But I'm not sure, honestly and truthfully, whether he has the capacity to make teams better if he has the ultimate control. I mean, you only have to look at him. He frightens people when he walks into situations. ['Does he frighten you?' Bond is asked.] Nah nah, he used to, but I've long since known him. I've stood up to him. I could work with him, I'd fight him and bite him."
Deliciously, Allison is sitting in the same press conference, two seats away from Bond. He is smoking a fat cigar with a look of glorious malevolence in his eyes. It is impossible to take your gaze off him. SM
2) An Impossible Job (1994)
Graham: John! JOHN!!!
Phil: John!
Graham: Barnsey! Tuck in more!
Lawrie: Ten yards in!
Graham: Tuck in more!
Phil: In to go out!
Graham: Tuck inside more!
Phil: In to go out!
Lawrie: Tony ... Tony ...
Graham: That's better.
Lawrie: That's better.
Phil: That's better!
When this snatch of in-depth tactical tuition from England's top managerial talent was first broadcast in 1994, so many pennies dropped across the nation that it was small wonder the country didn't go into immediate recession. Graham Taylor had infamously failed to lead England to that year's World Cup finals, and here, presented in the sitcom format for our high amusement, were the shambolic reasons for failure.
An Impossible Job was immediately hailed as a comic masterpiece. Taylor and the other two stooges, footballing lyrebird Phil Neal and retired golf club captain Lawrie McMenemy, never gave the impression of being in control of their situation. England's campaign started badly with a home draw against Norway – Paul Gascoigne, debating what was going wrong, settled on the fact that "the ball is shit" – and never recovered momentum.
Taylor's subsequent troubled touchline performances were the stuff of instant legend. "Do I not like that" and "Can we not knock it?!" from the trip to Poland we know all too well, though perhaps the comedy connoisseur's choice came during the following game. With England 2-0 down in Norway and running through their slapstick repertoire of misplaced passes, Taylor can be heard crumbling off-screen, a couple of resigned "aw F***ing hells" as near as you'll ever get to perfect comic timing.
Taylor was as unconsciously entertaining away from the pitch, whether confessing to regularly waking up from stressful slumber with "pyjamas wet through", or holding court on the subject of pitch sizes for kids in front of a bored audience of prison inmates, a scene now reminiscent of Alan Partridge discussing the pedestrianisation of Norwich city centre during his one-man show at the travel tavern.
Yet the ludicrousness of Taylor's catchphrases distorts the memory. Watch it today, and Taylor actually comes out of it very well, despite his gauche clumsiness and occasional rank ineptitude. He's a true, if slightly bruised, gentleman, trying his damnedest for everyone. The genuine hurt in his eyes seconds after the infamous "do I not like that" outburst. Visiting David Platt in Italy to ensure the player is OK with his captaincy being handed to Stuart Pearce. ("I wanted it, and it's nice to have had it," smiled Platt, genuinely, "but in terms of the morale of the squad, I think it's the right thing to do." Take notes, big John.) The gentle chiding of his journalistic aggressors. (He famously skins and fillets Rob Shepherd during one press conference, but his quips are gentle, showing a respect for a profession he was well within his rights to detest).
He also deals with his impending sacking, after those ludicrous decisions in Holland, in a more dignified manner than any of us could surely ever manage. "I'm just saying to your colleague, the referee has got me the sack," he whispers to the linesman, an old-school British gent, diplomacy taking precedence over righteous rage. "Thank him ever so much for that, won't you?"
And for a man destined to be remembered for silly, snappy soundbites, his longer oration before that crucial Holland encounter is surprisingly touching. "In life there's so many opportunities, and they're always round about you. And there's too many people in life that never see them. And then there are those people who see the opportunities and don't wanna grasp them. And then there's the other people who generally are life's winners, and they see the opportunities and they go looking for them, and when they see them they grasp them. And that's what you're facing now on the football field, in't it? Go F***ing take the opportunity. It's there for you. Wring every little bit out of it." OK, so it's not quite up there with Kipling's If. But it didn't half get an unfortunate England playing well that night. SM
3) Club for a Fiver (1995)
When the documentary-maker Jo Treharne took a flyer on producing a behind-the-scenes documentary for Channel 4 on Leyton Orient's 1994-95 season, she could scarcely have imagined what an endlessly quotable unpolished gem she was about to unearth. Club for a Fiver, an allusion to a remark by the then chairman Tony Wood that he'd sell up for five quid, charts a traumatic campaign for the east London club who went into financial meltdown and footballing freefall, sinking ingloriously into the Fourth Division under the hamstrung management duo of John Sitton and Chris Turner.
Sitton is the undoubted star, his exasperation with his hapless charges manifesting itself in ever-more colourful sweary rants. Club for a Fiver reaches its highpoint/lowpoint when Sitton summarily dismisses the long-serving defender Terry Howard at half-time of a match against Blackpool, a team-talk which soon mutates into a generalised tirade against a number of players culminating in an invitation to two of them – "You, ya little c**t … and you, ya F***in' big c**t" – to settle their differences physically. "And you can bring yer F***in' dinner, cos by the time I've finished with you you'll F***in' need it," Sitton adds.
Sitton and Turner were both sacked towards the end of the season and while Turner has since found plenty of other work in professional management, his co-boss at Brisbane Road has not. The screening of Club for a Fiver six months after the season ended jolted Sitton into sending a lengthy hand-written letter to the Leyton Orientear fanzine (which, declaring an interest, I edited at the time), deriding a documentary "that at best can only be described as sensationalist and at worst totally inaccurate and unbalanced". Sitton blamed the chaotic administration of the club for making his job impossible and complained that the programme only showed the "four or five times" he reached the end of his tether.
He had a point: as someone who served the O's with distinction as a player, Sitton deserved some sympathy. His honesty could be admired, as could his turn of phrase, which has made Club for a Fiver endlessly quotable. Sitton-isms are still regularly trotted out by O's fans, making this something of a Withnail and I for long-suffering lower-division diehards. TD
4) Six Days to Saturday (1963)
Swindon wasn't exactly swinging in the 60s, but at least the local football team could boast a few movers and shakers. In 1963, Bert Head's young Swindon Town side had just been promoted from the Third Division, and were expected to do well at the higher level. "It took them 42 years to get into the Second Division," jabbered one over-excitable local journalist, "it'll take them only 42 games to get into the First." Another promotion wouldn't happen, but the confidence wasn't totally misplaced. The team featured three stars who would go on to make indelible marks on the English game: the future Manchester City legend Mike Summerbee, Swindon's 1969 League Cup final hero Don Rogers, and Coventry's donkey-kick beneficiary Ernie Hunt.
Another up-and-coming talent arrived with his camera from the snappy sounding "BBC West Region" to film the players as they went about their business. John Boorman – who in 1972, as Rogers was famously sashaying through Manchester United's back line in a Crystal Palace shirt, would enjoy critical success with the altogether more outré Deliverance – poked his camera into the everyday lives of Swindon's young squad. The resulting film was a study of life in sleepy suburbia, but instead of a screen filled with the era's trademark angry young men, well brought up young lads whiled away the hours after training by playing snooker, buying bags of boiled sweets, and giving their beloved old manager a haircut, as Hunt does. (He accidentally draws blood with the scissor. Head laughs.) Saturday Night, Sunday Morning this was most certainly not.
"In the afternoons," began the film's most evocative monologue, "they are free. Donald Rogers, a youth international, leaves the club hostel where he lives for the weekly visit to his parents in Midsomer Norton. Their leisure is not taxing in the ordinary sense. They go to the cinema two or three times a week, drive a little aimlessly in the country, visit the new bowling alley. Mindless pursuits. But a professional footballer cannot afford to be too interested in the world. Their career makes ruthless demands on mind as well as body. All thought, all energy, must be conserved. Their lives are in suspension, held in abeyance until Saturday.
"Always in the public eye, they must conform to public notions of virtue. They may drive a car, provided it is modest in size. They may accept a drink, but only one. They must return every greeting ... they can never really relax. Wherever they go they are known and watched. They are the focus of pride for an industrial city of 92,000. Their fame renders them vulnerable. The men at [local factories] Pressed Steel, of Plesseys, of the locomotive yards, admire their prowess, resent their freedom and high wages. Ill at ease in their own community, they defend themselves by modesty, decorum and politeness. They have steady girlfriends or marry young. They are neither extravagant nor ostentatious. Their money goes into the bank, or into wise insurance policies. on necessary household equipment. Owen Dawson is cautious and doesn't even run a car."
How times change, eh? SM
5) The Golden Vision (1968)
Boorman wasn't the only top talent to direct a BBC football documentaries back in the 60s. This snapshot of life at Everton – for both the fans and the players – was directed by Ken Loach. And co-written by Gordon Honeycombe, later to become an avuncular newscaster during the glory days of ITN in the 1970s. Their film was a slightly strange hybrid: transmitted under the BBC's Play for Today banner, it was half-drama, half-documentary, though not quite in the sense we think of a docu-drama now. It really was half of one and 50% of the other: interviews with the Everton players and action from their games against Manchester City, Arsenal and Sheffield United, spliced with a comedy-drama in Loach's trademark social realist style.
Starring Bill Dean, who would later find fame as Harry Cross in Brookside, and who took his stage name from a certain striker from the 1920s and 1930s, the drama follows a couple of friends and their families, mad Evertonians young and old. Loach's film is of its time, but the passions are as relevant today: a dying old man chronicling the ups and downs of his life with reference to Everton's roll of honour, kids obsessively learning their history, the longer-of-tooth championing the old stars over the new, fans experiencing the joy of travelling halfway across the country in the back of a van on an awayday.
The funniest scene in the very warm-hearted film pictures a young lad saying his prayers. "The father, the son, the holy ghost, amen. God bless Gordon West, Tommy Wright, Ray Wilson, Brian Labone, Colin Harvey, Howard Kendall, Alan Ball, Alex Young …" Once he's been through the whole team, he asks the big man upstairs to "bless all the reserves" before eventually adding the afterthought of his mum and dad.
The players themselves, of course, are less innocent, unable to enjoy the sport as a simple pleasure. Young, the eponymous Golden Vision, indulges in some intriguing introspection. "I never thought I'd ever be a good player," he admits in a shy Scottish burr. "I was always mad keen, never thought I'd ever be a professional. I used to always think professionals were all posh people, a way above what I could ever be. I don't know any pro that feels absolutely secure. I think the point about professional footballers is we all feel very insecure because it's a job that doesn't last forever, it goes all too quickly. I think I'm a bit erratic. I can compare with anybody when I'm playing well, but sometimes I drop down to the depths. I've tried to think about it but I can't understand it." Soon after, the mercurial Young, who had won two league titles in Scotland with Hearts and one with Everton in 1963, was allowed to leave for Glentoran.
Cynicism with the game is rife. "I don't think there is any footballer now that really enjoys the game," says goalkeeper West. "I don't think you can enjoy it 100%," agrees the club captain Labone. "I certainly don't enjoy the game," replies West, who two years later would turn down a place in England's World Cup squad because he couldn't bear to be away from his family. There are also the first signs of the sport getting out of hand. "Some teams go out to try to cripple the star player on the other side," sighs Labone. The World Cup winner Wilson agrees: "The game has got so big, results mean everything now. Everyone wants to play West Ham, simply because you know you're going to get a good open game. I'd like to see more teams like West Ham." Everton's aged owner John Moores, meanwhile, was busy banging the nail right on the head. "Football is now a mixture of sport, big business and showbusiness," he noted, sharp as a tack.
1968, this was. SM
6) Hillsborough (1996)
"It was 1906, the year of the great San Francisco earthquake," recalled the old boy in The Golden Vision, just before delivering the punchline of that play's darkest joke. "That was a great disaster. But it was a disaster for Newcastle that day too when we beat them 1-0!" Bill Shankly's stylish renosing of the Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi's life-and-death zinger would become another of the era's hardy perennials, too, but events would eventually put a hold on this sort of patter.
The city of Liverpool would, 28 years after Loach's classic, produce another docu-drama melding football's often uncomfortable coexistence with real life. This one, however, would feature none of The Golden Vision's jauntiness, its subject matter more in keeping with the unremitting misery of Loach's other early masterpiece, Cathy Come Home. Jimmy McGovern – a modern-day Loach, and surely British television's greatest righteous warrior – pieced together the events surrounding the Hillsborough outrage, using input from surviving family members and those at the ground on that fateful day. Grim fare indeed, but the resulting piece was transcendental: economically scripted, tastefully filmed and thoughtfully acted – the star turn, if it's appropriate to name one in such a film, was Christopher Ecclestone as Trevor Hicks, raging against the machine with quiet dignity – it was a touching cry of anguish and anger in equally painful measure.
Shown seven years after the tragedy, Hillsborough performed a vital role in British social history: many thousands, maybe millions, nationwide still harboured the errant notion that Liverpool fans were somehow at fault for the carnage, a terrible mixed legacy of authoritarian dissembling and the Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie's smugly idiotic decision to betray both the victims and his own readers with a half-cocked version of "THE TRUTH". In the wake of McGovern's pitch-perfect response, few of the innocently misguided remained glued to their preconceptions for much longer. Documentaries – and docu-dramas – come no better. SM
www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2010/nov/05/the-joy-of-six-football-documentaries
GUARDIAN - Scott Murray
\The Joy of Six: Football documentaries
From that Graham Taylor film to Jimmy McGovern's Hillsborough here are half-a-dozen great documentaries and docu-dramas
1) City! (1981)
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Here's Manchester City bunging vast sums of money after new players, only to find them not delivering at all. It's 1980, and after an £8m investment in their playing staff, City are rooted to the bottom of the First Division. Their manager Malcolm Allison had coached City to title glory in the late 1960s and very early 70s, but by this point, those days seemed a very long time ago. Especially when champions Liverpool turned up at Maine Road and delivered a hellish spanking. "It was a bad goal," a ratty Allison moaned, when journalists talked up a Kenny Dalglish strike. "It's gone in the net at about two miles per hour. How can that be a good goal from 20-odd yards? [Pinteresque pause, as grim acceptance sets in] The third goal was a good goal …"
Serendipity plays a big part in making a great documentary, and Granada's crew found itself in the right place at the right time. Allison is soon sacked – a decision he takes with surprising grace, given his bullish reputation for china-shop bothering, warmly bidding his farewells to each and every member of staff – and replaced with John Bond, who swans into Maine Road and charms the City board with a very strange interview. As he speaks, one board member sucks hard on a fag, staring into the world's biggest ashtray. The chairman Peter Swales sits idly by, flicking a book of matches into the air from the edge of the boardroom table. "I ain't going to have people who are going about and, excuse the expression, pissing about and sort of flouting the image of Manchester City about, I don't think that's right," promises Bond, esoterically. Somehow, the speech goes down a treat. "I came prepared to be a little disillusioned," says one board member, his attitude a glove-like fit for the club he's serving, "but I'm very impressed with him."
Allison moves to Crystal Palace, and the two teams are drawn together in the FA Cup. After City win the tie, Bond offers his opinion of his predecessor – a former team-mate at West Ham – in a spectacular post-match press conference. "I think if you could get somebody who was big enough to control him and run him and be connected with him, I think you could be really, really successful," he says. "But I tell you what, you have to really have somebody who can control him. Because there is absolutely no doubt he has the ability and the capacity to make players better. But I'm not sure, honestly and truthfully, whether he has the capacity to make teams better if he has the ultimate control. I mean, you only have to look at him. He frightens people when he walks into situations. ['Does he frighten you?' Bond is asked.] Nah nah, he used to, but I've long since known him. I've stood up to him. I could work with him, I'd fight him and bite him."
Deliciously, Allison is sitting in the same press conference, two seats away from Bond. He is smoking a fat cigar with a look of glorious malevolence in his eyes. It is impossible to take your gaze off him. SM
2) An Impossible Job (1994)
Graham: John! JOHN!!!
Phil: John!
Graham: Barnsey! Tuck in more!
Lawrie: Ten yards in!
Graham: Tuck in more!
Phil: In to go out!
Graham: Tuck inside more!
Phil: In to go out!
Lawrie: Tony ... Tony ...
Graham: That's better.
Lawrie: That's better.
Phil: That's better!
When this snatch of in-depth tactical tuition from England's top managerial talent was first broadcast in 1994, so many pennies dropped across the nation that it was small wonder the country didn't go into immediate recession. Graham Taylor had infamously failed to lead England to that year's World Cup finals, and here, presented in the sitcom format for our high amusement, were the shambolic reasons for failure.
An Impossible Job was immediately hailed as a comic masterpiece. Taylor and the other two stooges, footballing lyrebird Phil Neal and retired golf club captain Lawrie McMenemy, never gave the impression of being in control of their situation. England's campaign started badly with a home draw against Norway – Paul Gascoigne, debating what was going wrong, settled on the fact that "the ball is shit" – and never recovered momentum.
Taylor's subsequent troubled touchline performances were the stuff of instant legend. "Do I not like that" and "Can we not knock it?!" from the trip to Poland we know all too well, though perhaps the comedy connoisseur's choice came during the following game. With England 2-0 down in Norway and running through their slapstick repertoire of misplaced passes, Taylor can be heard crumbling off-screen, a couple of resigned "aw F***ing hells" as near as you'll ever get to perfect comic timing.
Taylor was as unconsciously entertaining away from the pitch, whether confessing to regularly waking up from stressful slumber with "pyjamas wet through", or holding court on the subject of pitch sizes for kids in front of a bored audience of prison inmates, a scene now reminiscent of Alan Partridge discussing the pedestrianisation of Norwich city centre during his one-man show at the travel tavern.
Yet the ludicrousness of Taylor's catchphrases distorts the memory. Watch it today, and Taylor actually comes out of it very well, despite his gauche clumsiness and occasional rank ineptitude. He's a true, if slightly bruised, gentleman, trying his damnedest for everyone. The genuine hurt in his eyes seconds after the infamous "do I not like that" outburst. Visiting David Platt in Italy to ensure the player is OK with his captaincy being handed to Stuart Pearce. ("I wanted it, and it's nice to have had it," smiled Platt, genuinely, "but in terms of the morale of the squad, I think it's the right thing to do." Take notes, big John.) The gentle chiding of his journalistic aggressors. (He famously skins and fillets Rob Shepherd during one press conference, but his quips are gentle, showing a respect for a profession he was well within his rights to detest).
He also deals with his impending sacking, after those ludicrous decisions in Holland, in a more dignified manner than any of us could surely ever manage. "I'm just saying to your colleague, the referee has got me the sack," he whispers to the linesman, an old-school British gent, diplomacy taking precedence over righteous rage. "Thank him ever so much for that, won't you?"
And for a man destined to be remembered for silly, snappy soundbites, his longer oration before that crucial Holland encounter is surprisingly touching. "In life there's so many opportunities, and they're always round about you. And there's too many people in life that never see them. And then there are those people who see the opportunities and don't wanna grasp them. And then there's the other people who generally are life's winners, and they see the opportunities and they go looking for them, and when they see them they grasp them. And that's what you're facing now on the football field, in't it? Go F***ing take the opportunity. It's there for you. Wring every little bit out of it." OK, so it's not quite up there with Kipling's If. But it didn't half get an unfortunate England playing well that night. SM
3) Club for a Fiver (1995)
When the documentary-maker Jo Treharne took a flyer on producing a behind-the-scenes documentary for Channel 4 on Leyton Orient's 1994-95 season, she could scarcely have imagined what an endlessly quotable unpolished gem she was about to unearth. Club for a Fiver, an allusion to a remark by the then chairman Tony Wood that he'd sell up for five quid, charts a traumatic campaign for the east London club who went into financial meltdown and footballing freefall, sinking ingloriously into the Fourth Division under the hamstrung management duo of John Sitton and Chris Turner.
Sitton is the undoubted star, his exasperation with his hapless charges manifesting itself in ever-more colourful sweary rants. Club for a Fiver reaches its highpoint/lowpoint when Sitton summarily dismisses the long-serving defender Terry Howard at half-time of a match against Blackpool, a team-talk which soon mutates into a generalised tirade against a number of players culminating in an invitation to two of them – "You, ya little c**t … and you, ya F***in' big c**t" – to settle their differences physically. "And you can bring yer F***in' dinner, cos by the time I've finished with you you'll F***in' need it," Sitton adds.
Sitton and Turner were both sacked towards the end of the season and while Turner has since found plenty of other work in professional management, his co-boss at Brisbane Road has not. The screening of Club for a Fiver six months after the season ended jolted Sitton into sending a lengthy hand-written letter to the Leyton Orientear fanzine (which, declaring an interest, I edited at the time), deriding a documentary "that at best can only be described as sensationalist and at worst totally inaccurate and unbalanced". Sitton blamed the chaotic administration of the club for making his job impossible and complained that the programme only showed the "four or five times" he reached the end of his tether.
He had a point: as someone who served the O's with distinction as a player, Sitton deserved some sympathy. His honesty could be admired, as could his turn of phrase, which has made Club for a Fiver endlessly quotable. Sitton-isms are still regularly trotted out by O's fans, making this something of a Withnail and I for long-suffering lower-division diehards. TD
4) Six Days to Saturday (1963)
Swindon wasn't exactly swinging in the 60s, but at least the local football team could boast a few movers and shakers. In 1963, Bert Head's young Swindon Town side had just been promoted from the Third Division, and were expected to do well at the higher level. "It took them 42 years to get into the Second Division," jabbered one over-excitable local journalist, "it'll take them only 42 games to get into the First." Another promotion wouldn't happen, but the confidence wasn't totally misplaced. The team featured three stars who would go on to make indelible marks on the English game: the future Manchester City legend Mike Summerbee, Swindon's 1969 League Cup final hero Don Rogers, and Coventry's donkey-kick beneficiary Ernie Hunt.
Another up-and-coming talent arrived with his camera from the snappy sounding "BBC West Region" to film the players as they went about their business. John Boorman – who in 1972, as Rogers was famously sashaying through Manchester United's back line in a Crystal Palace shirt, would enjoy critical success with the altogether more outré Deliverance – poked his camera into the everyday lives of Swindon's young squad. The resulting film was a study of life in sleepy suburbia, but instead of a screen filled with the era's trademark angry young men, well brought up young lads whiled away the hours after training by playing snooker, buying bags of boiled sweets, and giving their beloved old manager a haircut, as Hunt does. (He accidentally draws blood with the scissor. Head laughs.) Saturday Night, Sunday Morning this was most certainly not.
"In the afternoons," began the film's most evocative monologue, "they are free. Donald Rogers, a youth international, leaves the club hostel where he lives for the weekly visit to his parents in Midsomer Norton. Their leisure is not taxing in the ordinary sense. They go to the cinema two or three times a week, drive a little aimlessly in the country, visit the new bowling alley. Mindless pursuits. But a professional footballer cannot afford to be too interested in the world. Their career makes ruthless demands on mind as well as body. All thought, all energy, must be conserved. Their lives are in suspension, held in abeyance until Saturday.
"Always in the public eye, they must conform to public notions of virtue. They may drive a car, provided it is modest in size. They may accept a drink, but only one. They must return every greeting ... they can never really relax. Wherever they go they are known and watched. They are the focus of pride for an industrial city of 92,000. Their fame renders them vulnerable. The men at [local factories] Pressed Steel, of Plesseys, of the locomotive yards, admire their prowess, resent their freedom and high wages. Ill at ease in their own community, they defend themselves by modesty, decorum and politeness. They have steady girlfriends or marry young. They are neither extravagant nor ostentatious. Their money goes into the bank, or into wise insurance policies. on necessary household equipment. Owen Dawson is cautious and doesn't even run a car."
How times change, eh? SM
5) The Golden Vision (1968)
Boorman wasn't the only top talent to direct a BBC football documentaries back in the 60s. This snapshot of life at Everton – for both the fans and the players – was directed by Ken Loach. And co-written by Gordon Honeycombe, later to become an avuncular newscaster during the glory days of ITN in the 1970s. Their film was a slightly strange hybrid: transmitted under the BBC's Play for Today banner, it was half-drama, half-documentary, though not quite in the sense we think of a docu-drama now. It really was half of one and 50% of the other: interviews with the Everton players and action from their games against Manchester City, Arsenal and Sheffield United, spliced with a comedy-drama in Loach's trademark social realist style.
Starring Bill Dean, who would later find fame as Harry Cross in Brookside, and who took his stage name from a certain striker from the 1920s and 1930s, the drama follows a couple of friends and their families, mad Evertonians young and old. Loach's film is of its time, but the passions are as relevant today: a dying old man chronicling the ups and downs of his life with reference to Everton's roll of honour, kids obsessively learning their history, the longer-of-tooth championing the old stars over the new, fans experiencing the joy of travelling halfway across the country in the back of a van on an awayday.
The funniest scene in the very warm-hearted film pictures a young lad saying his prayers. "The father, the son, the holy ghost, amen. God bless Gordon West, Tommy Wright, Ray Wilson, Brian Labone, Colin Harvey, Howard Kendall, Alan Ball, Alex Young …" Once he's been through the whole team, he asks the big man upstairs to "bless all the reserves" before eventually adding the afterthought of his mum and dad.
The players themselves, of course, are less innocent, unable to enjoy the sport as a simple pleasure. Young, the eponymous Golden Vision, indulges in some intriguing introspection. "I never thought I'd ever be a good player," he admits in a shy Scottish burr. "I was always mad keen, never thought I'd ever be a professional. I used to always think professionals were all posh people, a way above what I could ever be. I don't know any pro that feels absolutely secure. I think the point about professional footballers is we all feel very insecure because it's a job that doesn't last forever, it goes all too quickly. I think I'm a bit erratic. I can compare with anybody when I'm playing well, but sometimes I drop down to the depths. I've tried to think about it but I can't understand it." Soon after, the mercurial Young, who had won two league titles in Scotland with Hearts and one with Everton in 1963, was allowed to leave for Glentoran.
Cynicism with the game is rife. "I don't think there is any footballer now that really enjoys the game," says goalkeeper West. "I don't think you can enjoy it 100%," agrees the club captain Labone. "I certainly don't enjoy the game," replies West, who two years later would turn down a place in England's World Cup squad because he couldn't bear to be away from his family. There are also the first signs of the sport getting out of hand. "Some teams go out to try to cripple the star player on the other side," sighs Labone. The World Cup winner Wilson agrees: "The game has got so big, results mean everything now. Everyone wants to play West Ham, simply because you know you're going to get a good open game. I'd like to see more teams like West Ham." Everton's aged owner John Moores, meanwhile, was busy banging the nail right on the head. "Football is now a mixture of sport, big business and showbusiness," he noted, sharp as a tack.
1968, this was. SM
6) Hillsborough (1996)
"It was 1906, the year of the great San Francisco earthquake," recalled the old boy in The Golden Vision, just before delivering the punchline of that play's darkest joke. "That was a great disaster. But it was a disaster for Newcastle that day too when we beat them 1-0!" Bill Shankly's stylish renosing of the Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi's life-and-death zinger would become another of the era's hardy perennials, too, but events would eventually put a hold on this sort of patter.
The city of Liverpool would, 28 years after Loach's classic, produce another docu-drama melding football's often uncomfortable coexistence with real life. This one, however, would feature none of The Golden Vision's jauntiness, its subject matter more in keeping with the unremitting misery of Loach's other early masterpiece, Cathy Come Home. Jimmy McGovern – a modern-day Loach, and surely British television's greatest righteous warrior – pieced together the events surrounding the Hillsborough outrage, using input from surviving family members and those at the ground on that fateful day. Grim fare indeed, but the resulting piece was transcendental: economically scripted, tastefully filmed and thoughtfully acted – the star turn, if it's appropriate to name one in such a film, was Christopher Ecclestone as Trevor Hicks, raging against the machine with quiet dignity – it was a touching cry of anguish and anger in equally painful measure.
Shown seven years after the tragedy, Hillsborough performed a vital role in British social history: many thousands, maybe millions, nationwide still harboured the errant notion that Liverpool fans were somehow at fault for the carnage, a terrible mixed legacy of authoritarian dissembling and the Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie's smugly idiotic decision to betray both the victims and his own readers with a half-cocked version of "THE TRUTH". In the wake of McGovern's pitch-perfect response, few of the innocently misguided remained glued to their preconceptions for much longer. Documentaries – and docu-dramas – come no better. SM
www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2010/nov/05/the-joy-of-six-football-documentaries