KICKING & SCREAMING

(1995)

The BBC’s six-part history of English football is hard to find in full on YouTube and was last repeated in 1998. A talking-heads-and-clips classic, it draws a line from unregulated village-versus-village ball games, of the type that survives on bank holidays today, to the birth of the Premier League. It has a lot of little-seen footage, and an understated sense of humour. Scotland’s Denis Law ends the episode about 1966 and all that: “I was playing golf in Manchester and, unlike Manchester, it was raining. There were two of us on the course. The guy I was playing with was awful. And he beat me. As we turned the corner of the course, all the members were at the window [of the clubhouse]. England had won 4–2. I thought it was the end of the world.”