The Truth About Footballers - ITV, Tuesday
My Summer With Des - BBC 1, Monday
Friends - Network 2, Monday
The Rope Trick - BBC 2, Wednesday
Fair City - RTE 1, Tuesday & Thursday
The blonde in the pink, rubber mini-dress was determined to snag a professional footballer. Peering through eyelashes that looked like spiders' legs on industrial-strength Viagra, she appeared focused enough to tackle the entire England World Cup squad. Footballers, it seems, have won promotion above even rock stars in what Angus Deayton termed the "shagability" league. Certainly, football is having its way with every genre on television these times, colonising even documentaries and drama, which, until recently, were sanctuaries for saddo sports-haters.
But you've got to have sympathy for the saddos. Football mania is veering out of control. These few weeks between the end of the club season and the start of the World Cup should be a kind of extended half-time break - even a detox period. Yet football on television - traditional, terrestrial television - continues to grow more quickly than a 25goals-a-season Premiership striker's bank balance. This week, The Truth About Footballers and My Summer With Des dominated prime time on successive evenings on Britain's two most watched channels.
The former was a documentary in typical The Truth. . . style. In other words it featured machinegun editing of interviews with players, fans (mostly well-known ones) and football women in which sex, money, fame, superstition, spare-time activities and injuries were discussed. The technique has the advantage of allowing the director and editor to assemble the soundbites in ways which suggest that contributors are responding to each other. Context, therefore, is manipulated. It also means that nobody gets to talk for more than about 20 seconds at a stretch. In football terms, it is a short-passing game, played "at pace" (i.e. "fast").
Not unexpectedly, sex - especially pre-match sex - was the subject of much comment. "I did it once in the morning before a game and I don't remember playing so badly, you know. No, I was good! I scored two goals: one in the morning and one in the afternoon," said Chelsea's Frank Leboeuf. Hilarious, Frank! It's unlikely, however, that Glenn Hoddle's England will avail of the Leboeuf training technique. "Steve McManaman says that joining up with the England squad now is like joining a religious cult," said Jeff Powell of the Daily Mail.
"Glenn is claiming that three-quarters of them are now believers," (in Christianity), he added. Still, beside Uri Geller, Hoddle seems as well-balanced as Blondini. To the X-Files theme music, Geller explained how he has "energised" the World Cup for England. He claimed that during Euro '96, he flew over Wembley stadium in a helicopter just as Scotland's captain Gary McAlister was about to take a penalty against England. Using "kinetic energy", Uri made the ball move on the spot. Consequently, McAllister fluffed the shot and Seaman saved. Well played, Uri!
Still, scepticism about Uri's claims was small beer compared to the derision heaped upon footballers' taste in houses. "Mock Tudor" guaranteed the kind of sneering usually reserved for an own goal by an especially despicable centre back. And then there was the matter of footballers playing golf and going fishing. Relaxing from "the coolest sport in the world" by "putting on Pringle jumpers", footballers must, said Patrick Kielty, "be taking the piss". Fishing was equally scorned: "What's with all this fishing? I just don't get it," sniggered Kielty, shaking his head.
The average Premiership salary nowadays is £293,000 a year. Many players make three or four times this amount. "Cars, money and girls" impress younger fans. At present, 12 per cent of Premiership season-ticket holders are women and their numbers continue to grow. To the strains of Twist And Shout, evocative of the heyday of Beatlemania, we saw Ryan Giggs besieged by teenage girls at a book-signing. Cut then to David Busst's horrific injury which ended his career. It reminded viewers that there are no guarantees in football.
But overall, this documentary was merely an edited highlights (and/or lowlights) package. Nonetheless, its fast-paced, tabloid style, though excessively keen to test-drive cliches, was a timely reminder that, at heart, football should be primarily about fun. Oh, there's skill and drama and passion and all that too. But in an age when ideology (apart from "free-market" ideology) seems comatose, the investment by so many of so much emotional energy, not just in the game of football but in its trivia, should be worrying. Should David Beckham bend a few free-kicks into the goals of England's opponents this summer, get your red cards ready for Uri Geller.
Football drama this week was provided by My Summer With Des, a eulogy to ageing smoothie Des Lynam. More specifically, it was a eulogy to Lynam's lounge-lizard moustache. Neil Morrissey played football-obsessed Martin as a displaced version of Tony, the sad, idiot-lad he played in Men Behaving Badly. Anyway, having lost his job and his girlfriend during the summer of Euro '96, Martin scores with Rosie (Rachel Weisz), a kind of celestial bimbo sent by godhead Des to sort out the idiot's disastrous life.
As such, it was a cross between Fever Pitch, Match Of The Day and Touched By An Angel. The Martin/Rosie affair mirrored England's fortunes on the pitch: multiple orgasms when England thrashed Holland 4-1; heartbreak when Southgate missed his penalty against Germany. The plot, such as it was, was spliced together with (and took its cues from) Lynam's comments during the championship. Certainly it was, in spots, both funny and imaginative - rather like a David Ginola performance. But the suspension of disbelief required ensured that credibility was under severe pressure for long stretches.
There was a subplot which centred on England v Scotland animosity. Predictably, this had as much to do with "shagging" as with football. Priapism, it seems, is a necessary condition for the committed football fan these days. Written by comedian Arthur Smith, who scored big-time with his soccer play and TV film, An Evening With Gary Lineker, this was, in effect, a replay. An Oasis soundtrack over scenes of fans converging on London pumped up the zeitgeisty mood of the whole thing.
Still, at the end of the day (that's still an acceptable football cliche?) this was fantasy football - in particular, sexual-fantasy football. Designed to appeal to the contrived fecklessness of contrived Cool Britannia, its cleverness in technique was ultimately undermined by its daftness. In fairness, it reflected the "feel-good factor" beloved of New Labour. But really, it was as much like an extended pop music video as like legitimate drama. It had excitements, alright, but it had an equal number of embarrassments.
In that sense, perhaps, it did reflect the reality of football. It didn't though, reflect much of the reality of life - normally a worthy criterion for drama. Lad culture is in decline anyway, so this piece looked rather dated. Lynam and his moustache, of course, got splendid pre-World Cup publicity. And that, in ways, was the most irritating aspect of all: the BBC, in the name of prime-time drama, albeit whimsical drama, used the slot as an advertorial to promote itself for the forthcoming football jamboree. They have a stronger line-up than ITV anyway. But if you had any doubt about market forces being the biggest player, not only in football, but in television, this one should have dispelled them.
There was an England v America thread throughout the heavily-hyped, hour-long final edition of Friends. The kind of "Yank abroad" jokes, characteristic of the vile and cloying Four Weddings And A Funeral probably play better back in the US than they do on this side of the Atlantic. Friends, though it regularly has brilliant one-liners, is just too appallingly cutesy and saccharine, its intelligence neutered by its vacuousness.
Including the likes of June Whitfield, Jennifer Saunders and Richard Branson in this extended episode, in which Ross was due to marry his English girlfriend Emily, resulted in Anglo-American mush. Rachel, Ross's ex, flies to London with the result that Ross blurts out to Emily: "I take thee, Rachel. . ." just before the camera zooms-in on Rachel's face and the credits roll. At least basing a play on Des Lynam's moustache could claim something in the way of imagination.
Still, there were funny moments - not least the extended trans-Atlantic, mobile-phone conversation between Phoebe and best man Joey as he walks down the aisle. Inappropriate and ostentatious uses of mobile phones are, of course, rightfully as derided as footballers' Mock Tudor houses and this was a classic of the genre. But Friends, like British ladology, seems tired and embarrassing at this point. Its cleverness is undeniable but its syrupy smugness is inexcusable.
Earthier and more real drama was supplied by The Rope Trick, an eight-minute piece by the Irish screenwriter Hugh Costello. Shot at Dublin airport, Sutton and on the road above Portrane beach, it was a darker tale about friends. Phelim Drew played the troubled Anto, returned from England for the funeral of an old friend. Though only 36, only he and one other of his six-strong childhood gang remain alive. The gang, we learn, inadvertently caused a car to crash years earlier.
Their childhood prank was to pretend that they were pulling a rope (hence the title) taut in front of an oncoming car. Drivers, naturally, slammed on the brakes. One day, this resulted in a car full of children sliding over a cliff. Anto and his last living sidekick from childhood (Michael Glenn Murphy) perform the rope trick one last time. Nobody is hurt but Murphy becomes hysterically distraught, reminding you that even childhood high jinks can lead to searing traumas sustained for life.
Tim Mercier's direction made the telling of the tale ideally laconic - a prerequisite for success, of course, when you've only got eight minutes. There is nothing necessarily wrong with brevity - so long as it's understood that an hour of 20-second soundbites distorts context. A mere eight minutes for a drama might sound ludicrously brief. But The Rope Trick worked because it stayed focused and didn't tie itself in knots by attempting too much. Terry Byrne as the guff-spewing Dublin taxi-driver - workaday banality amid revisited trauma - added suitable incongruity.
Finally, Fair City. Despite running plotlines concerning rape, divorce, infidelity, homosexuality, money-lending, alcoholism and, it appears, prostitution, this soap manages (just about) to maintain sufficient good humour to lend it some charm. It has had murder and a cult religion in the recent past, so it may be risking overload in terms of issues. Most of its central characters are believable but Jimmy Bartley's Bela Doyle is the star of the series. His current plight - unable to pay a thug moneylender - has made the character's life a shade too black. But Bartley is consistently as good as any soap actor on any channel. In yet another week characterised by hype, it's important to salute genuine quality.