Cameron Carter reviews BBC2’s programmes on the Munich air disaster and questions the use of thematic dramatisation in the build-up to football matchesUnited (BBC2, April 24) was a dramatisation of the Man Utd story from Bobby Charlton’s breakthrough into the first team to the frantic rebuilding after the Munich air crash.
Cameron Carter traces the social history of Britain through 25 years of friendly faces presenting football programmes on TVIn 1986 presenters and pundits sat stiffly, in wife-selected jackets, behind desks, because the desk is the key western symbol of wisdom. In 2011 we have lounging gigglers like Alan Hansen and Mark Lawrenson who do not even wear neckties, or the man-child Jamie Redknapp who is allowed to wear expensive fashion-clothes and constantly interrupt his elders in a career-long attempt to prove his right to be heard. The desk has gone.
An internatioanlly renowned midfielder who failed to live up to the hype but became a cult hero anyway. Damian Hall tells a heart-warming tale
Reputations, it is said, take ages to build but can be destroyed in an instant. This adage, though probably quite apt generally, is not at all true of John Jensen. He earned a reputation very quickly and lost it in a painfully slow, grinding kind of manner.
The Beckham to Spurs saga was covered in huge detail this winter. But, as Georgina Turner argues, it’s not all the player’s fault
I manage to pour my breakfast cereal each morning without a plastic model of a member of the Beckham family dropping uninvited into my bowl. I’ve never found one of them sitting outside my building, holding a piece of cardboard upon which is scrawled “Will dance a jig for attention”. I’ve yet to have a particularly tense episode of Spooks interrupted by a pirate broadcast from Beckingham Palace in which David, sporting oversized trousers and shoes, invites Victoria to smell a flower. Which has me confused, because Cirque du Beckham was supposed to be taking over the world. It said so in the papers.
With players going down easier, Matt Nation believes football is fast becoming a contactless sport
Watch an Over-55s game on my local pitch and you’ll rarely see a foul. The players may regale whoever will listen with stories of how a match wasn’t a match unless they’d broken their jaw at least once and then barged the opposing goalkeeper so hard that the game had to be stopped so that people could go and look for him, but they’re remarkably mild-mannered on the pitch. They have to be. Tackling is frowned upon or, if the referee is getting on a bit himself, banned outright.