Oh, football. It does rather take over, doesn’t it? As one who has oft written of his dependence on the broadcast schedule, I struggle to comprehend why the commencement of another international sporting competition means I can’t watch Have I Got News for You of a Friday evening. In recent years the BBC have just about got their heads round the concept that they don’t have to take Pointless off the telly to accommodate Wimbledon; it can pop over to BBC Two instead (and Flog It can do one; they’re all repeats now, anyway). This policy served everyone well during press conference season in the initial stages of the pandemic, and the consensus seemed to be that the Beeb could have done something similar in the wake of Prince Philip’s recent passing.

It would be fair to say that I do not respond well to change, but while I am far from delighted that everything has been shunted sideways for The European Footballing Championships, I’m not as up in arms as you might expect. Perhaps this is because, having grown up in a house too often divided by the passions of a West Ham supporter (my little brother) and a Fulham fan (our father), I understand the fever pitch [1] of excitement to which The Beautiful Game raises so many in our green and pleasant land.[2]

Back in 1990, I even felt the odd stirring myself (a rare thing these days). This was the balmy summer of the Italia World Cup; of Luciano Pavarotti’s recording of ‘Nessun Dorma’ not quite topping the charts, and of New Order’s ‘World in Motion’ actually topping the charts. The latter featured a video with (for some reason) Keith Allen, plus England Squadster John Barnes doing one of these new rap things in the middle (‘You can be fast or slow, but you must get to the line’; sage advice). It was difficult to ignore the mix of nostalgia (everyone thought the dream teaming of the two Garys – Lineker, and Paul ‘better known as Gaz’ Gascoigne – meant we were going to repeat the success of the 1966 World Cup, when we beat Germany,[3] apparently) and the optimism of a new team in a new decade (I’m sure we all felt the same as 2019 turned to 2020; remember that?). I actually ended up watching every one of the England games, either at home with my family or at a student house in Coventry, where I was visiting my good chum Ian Garwood, now a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow, but at the time a mere Warwick undergrad. Realising how ill equipped I was to take part in the football-related conversations that, not surprisingly, proliferated at the time, Ian took me to one side and taught me, parrot-fashion, to repeat the statement that John Barnes always struggled to reproduce his club form at an international level. Like Roy and Moss in that episode of The IT Crowd where they go online to seek street-credible soccer soundbites, I brought my carefully pronounced line into play in the union bar whenever the conversation started to flag. Ian’s peers would then nod knowingly and regard me with what I fancied to be a new level of respect.

Fig. 1: Lend me a tenor: Luciano has another sleepless night

It seemed to me England didn’t play all that well in the matches they actually won in Italia ’90, and only really pulled out a decent performance in the semi-final – which, in case you don’t know, we lost to Germany on penalties. Gascoigne had already burst into tears because he had been shown something called The Card, which meant he couldn’t have played in the final even if we had won. Sigh. It was admittedly a bad day for British football, but it all made for cracking live telly. The losing penalty was not scored by Chris Waddle, who had shorn his trademark mullet locks prior to the game. Whether this decision to, Samson-like, remove the follicular source of his footballing energies ultimately cost us the Championship of the World, we will never know.

In the long run, it doesn’t really matter; the golden promise of 1990 proved a mere pipe dream. Gary Lineker went on to forge a successful career as a crisp salesman, before growing a beard and becoming this millennium’s Jimmy Hill, while Gascoigne recently resurfaced on the Italian reality show L’Isola dei Famosi. Perhaps more significantly, Waddle’s blunder cut short my newly discovered passion for televised football, and henceforth our relationship returned to the more traditional format of me seeking refuge in my bedroom whenever a major match was on, my peace periodically punctuated by the sound of my dad bellowing ‘Yes…. Yes…. Yes… Ye- Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!!!!!!!!!’ from downstairs.

For the record, this is what he shouted – at some volume – whenever a player he was expecting to score a goal did not then in fact score said goal.

It was nothing more serious than that.

My attitude to football has since tended more towards the ironic. I liked it when, in his alter ego as Alan Partridge, Steve Coogan parodied the generic commentating style of people like John ‘Motty’ Motson,[4] OBE, for The Day Today, when presenting his favourite goals of the 1994 World Cup:

‘Yes…. Yes… Yes… Yes, yes, yes, yes… YEEEEEEEEEEEES! THAT… was a goal.’

‘TWAT! That was liquid football.’

‘Sh*t! Did you see that? He must have a foot like a traction engine.’

Fig. 2: Goal!

I also admired Friday night C4 heroes Adam and Joe’s attempt to replicate Baddiel and Skinner’s ‘Three Lions’ pop success with their own ‘Footie Song’, a passionate paean to The National Game by two people who neither watched nor understood it, which contained the immortal lyric:

‘When I go see Arsenal, I reckon they can pass ’n’ all.

When I go see Villa, my view is blocked by a concrete pillar.’

That sort of thing just about meets my level of footballing interest these days. Nonetheless, I will try not to begrudge the many impassioned fans out there who are currently helping deprive me of my regular evening viewing (at least Pointless is still on). In an unprecedented acknowledgement by the Corporation that we are not all ball-brains, EastEnders is currently being made available at the start of each week in box sets via the iPlayer. Making the whole thing available in a single, bingeable blat is of course a direct contravention of soap opera’s ‘everydayness’. Yes, we’ve had retrospective omnibuses in the past, allowing us to catch up on what happened every day that week, but this new development means that time will no longer (seem to be) passing at the same rate for the characters as for the audience; we will be getting a bizarre preview of what is about to happen over the next week, compressed into one, unrelenting session of Walfordian woe. As if this were not strange enough, the BBC have also put out a trailer to reassure the public that they can still get their misery-rite online, in which Queen Vic barman Mick Carter (Danny Dyer) cheerfully informs his punters that he’s ‘’ad a word wiv’ the BBC, and arranged for advance episodes of EastEnders to be made available online.

Fig. 3: Another beautiful day in Walford: The EastEnders box set has arrived

Yes, that’s right; the character of Mick Carter actually refers to EastEnders, meaning that the television soap is now part of its own diegesis. Put more simply, the characters in EastEnders have now been acknowledged as watching… EastEnders. Now, there have been rare moments in the past when one soap has acknowledged the existence of another, but what are the implications for the much-vaunted realism of the genre if soap characters are now admitting to watching themselves on TV? To be fair, there isn’t much else on (except the football) – but would you, for example, want to watch the people on Gogglebox reviewing Gogglebox?

Will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?

My partner wanted to know whether this latest development makes EastEnders a constructed reality show, like TOWIE, in which the participants know they are being filmed, and can see what they have all said about each other behind their backs when the episodes are screened. Imagine the implications this would have for the many affairs and murder plots that now form the crux of any half-decent soap.

Ian would have known Sharon was trying to poison him all along…

As a media lecturer type, I really should have a ready answer for all this – but for once I’m stumped.

And all because of football.

Ah, well; I honestly have no idea how long these tournaments last (though it feels like months). It may even be all over – with the crowd, presumably, on the pitch [5] – by the time you read this.

If you are a fan, I hope one of the teams you like won.

Have a smashing summer of sport, everyone!

 


Dr Richard Hewett is a lecturer in media theory and sport pundit. He has contributed articles to The Journal of British Cinema and Television, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Critical Studies in Television, Adaptation, SERIES – International Journal of Serial Narratives and Comedy Studies. His 2017 book, The Changing Spaces of Television Acting, was published in slightly more affordable paperback form last year. For more information on academic publications, see here. For non-academic writing, go there.

 

 

Footnotes

[1] This is a reference to the Nick Hornby book, which is all about football. I read it because I thought it might be a bit like High Fidelity. It wasn’t.

[2] When asked at school whom I supported, I quickly learned to reply: ‘My legs, because they support me.’ This was what passed for wit at the time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was always the last boy to be picked for the football teams.

[3] My dad was there (he’s a fan, remember), standing behind the goal, and he says Geoff Hurst’s match-making ball definitely went in. Right? Back of the net! Probably…

[4] Surely ‘Bon Mot’ would be a wittier epithet? But I forget; this is football we’re talking about…

[5] This is of course a reference to Kenneth Wolstenholme’s commentary on the closing moments of the 1966 World Cup final. See? I do actually know some football-related stuff.