Drive-by docs prove that live sport is the way to go
ANDREW PORTER’S ears have seen better days. The likeable loosehead prop says as much himself in the opening couple of moments of Six Nations: Full Contact, Netflix’s much-hyped and much-trumpeted behind-thescenes peek at ‘the oldest rugby championship in the world’.
When a fair bit of your working life is spent in the scrum, lugs that look like cauliflowers are just accepted as an occupational hazard.
Porter showing off his disfigured ears is how the producers set the tone early on of how brutal that this sport can be.
And we are left in no doubt within a few minutes what the Netflix treatment of rugby will mean. Primal. Aggressive. Monster.
These are just some of the words intoned in a solemn manner before the first episode has even found its feet.
Rugby’s physicality was easily discerned as the over-riding theme, with a lot of different camera angles on hard hits to make the viewer wince. Indeed, at times, the producers were just one step away from dragging up the old onomatopoeia cartoon shots from the Batman show of the 1960s. Remember when Adam West theatrically threw a punch at the Joker, and the screen would be filled with Biff! Well, here’s Porter running into Ellis Gange. Pow! Antonie Dupont finding the try-line. Bam! Finn Russell running into a sandwich of two Welsh players. Crunch!
Rugby Union is currently in the midst of a deep existential crisis over the amount of violence in the sport — a situation exacerbated by a certain lawsuit taken by hundreds of ex-players over concussion — so Netflix making the unique selling point that part of the game that everyone feels slightly uncomfortable about, was odd and questionable.
Perhaps, that is why Netflix zoned in on Porter and Genge, who would be considered combative characters that would rub opposition supporters up the wrong way, making them swear into their beer.
And the two props are so engaging and personable that they reinforce that old truism of the GAA, that it is often the hardest and most uncompromising corner backs on the field who tend to be the soundest of skins off it — call it the Ryan McMenamin paradox.
The producers got very little access to the Ireland camp – it was encouraging that, for all their financial muscle, Netflix were treated the same as lowly Irish sports journalists.
But Porter still emerges as one of the stars of the show — from the photo of him as a kid with Jonah Lomu to the heartbreaking back-story is wellknown to many of us, but it will certainly strike a chord with the American market that the Six Nations is trying to break.
Even now, it’s tough to watch this ‘monster of a man’ (as Ugo Monye, who spends the documentary series as a conduit explaining rugby to the uninitiated, describes the Irish prop) recounts his mother’s frequent visits to hospital when he was 11 and 12, his realisation that something was up and how he lost her just days before starting secondary school. We first meet Genge as he and a childhood friend are driving around the streets beside the Bristol housing estate where he grew up. He wastes no time telling us that rugby saved him from a life of crime or worse — becoming a plumber ike his dad. ‘There were a few paths I could have gone down,’ the Bristol front-rower explains. ‘I could have followed my dad and been a plumber. Or I could have followed all the other kids and sold drugs. Rugby has definitely stopped me from doing stuff I inevitably would have been involved in.
‘Any rules that I was given, I wanted to break. For some reason, I just wanted to rebel against everything. I didn’t really open myself up to people.’
Genge’s candour about feeling like an imposter as someone from a working-class background in the public-school environment that is rugby union also gives the documentary a sense of truth. And the thing is we do have to search for what feels genuine.
Most of the first episode is taken up by Finn Russell and how difficult the mercurial Scottish flyhalf is — we are helpfully informed early on that the fly-half is the conductor on the field — and how he doesn’t particularly see eyeto-eye with his coach Gregor Townsend. But the pair rise above that to direct the Scots to the two opening wins for the first time since Five Nations became Six.
We are let into the Scottish dressing room where we heard a lusty rendition of Loch Lomomd.
And after they hammered Wales by a record scoreline in Murrayfield, we take a peek into the dressing-room again where Stuart Hogg et al are once again singing about taking the low road.
But rugby is not all about beerswilling and trying to hold a tune. We are also introduced to Sebastian Negri in the episode where Kieran Crowley informs his Italian team that in 22 Six Nations, they have finished as wooden spooners 17 times. Not a nice record. No wonder Crowley and his coaching staff swear a lot.
Negri also has a fascinating back-story, having had to flee Robert Mugabe and his henchmen in Zimbabwe, but the most interesting aspect of his contribution is when he and his girlfriend discuss the moment that he was knocked out cold against England and swallowed his tongue. ‘I thought you were dead,’ his partner says starkly, a reminder of the dangers that lurk within this game.
The Italian flanker credits Genge’s quick thinking with saving his life on the pitch, creating a warm bond between the pair.
Netflix has been yearning to replicate Drive to Survive since that show sparked America’s unlikely love affair with Formula 1.
But it’s treatment of both the golf tour and the tennis circuit left the viewer feeling pretty short-changed — neither Coco Gauff or Novak Djokovic, tennis’ two biggest stars, allowed the Netflix cameras into their inner sanctum. Full Contact suffers for the same reason — Wales, the most interesting team during the 2023 championship, were less accommodating than Ireland, it seems.
The real drama begins on Friday and the reality is that no documentary can re-create the spectacle and sense of excitement of live sport.
It is why 29 of the top 30 mostwatched shows in the US last year were NFL games and Netflix, by their behaviour last week, have accepted that.
The day before Full Contact was released, news broke that Netflix signed a $5 billion deal to broadcast WWE (a couple of days later new grim allegations emerged about WWE owner Vince McMahon) from 2025. A pseudo sport it may be, but wrestling has a captive audience who want to watch it live.
You can only watch it live once, as the television advert reminds us.
Netflix may be coming around to that idea, especially if, as looks increasingly likely, the success of
was an outlier.