Hearts documentary was expected to deliver more
AFTER months of build- up and anticipation, the day finally arrived. A day that would unite football fans throughout Scotland as they eagerly turned- on their televisions that evening with a healthy dose of cautious optimism, a faint flickering of hope that what they were about to watch would match their expectations and come the end of it all, the mood of a nation would be lifted.
There’s a game on tonight
– a pretty big one, apparently – but here in these pages, I refuse to let myself get distracted with such frivolity as the biggest match our country has seen in 22 years. For me, this week would be defined by one event and one event only: the airing of the first episode of the new threepart Hearts documentary, a behind- the- scenes look at a disastrous campaign from one of the biggest clubs in Scotland.
I must admit, I was excited as I settled in. I’d seen the first series of Sunderland ’ Til I Die and enjoyed it, and caught the odd snippet from the glitzy productions from Amazon focusing on Manchester City and more recently Spurs. Scottish football has been crying out for something similar, I thought to myself, as I settled in to watch the wheels come flying off Hearts’ season in spectacular fashion, greedily awaiting the titbits of insight that would surely fall my way.
But they didn’t arrive. This was billed as a documentary that would give fans a peek behind the curtain to see how a modern football club is run in Scotland, with the chaos that erupted around Hearts’ campaign last term an added bonus from the neutral’s perspective. With all the tumultuous events that have taken place in Gorgie over the last year or so, there would surely be no shortage of incidents to indulge in a little schadenfreude.
How on earth did Craig Levein end up with two very important positions ( manager and director of football) simultaneously? What were those last few weeks in the dressing room like as the defeats started to pile up? What were the players thinking at the time? What was going through Levein’s head when he was under pressure? How does he even react when under pressure? And what does the process of culling a 70- man shortlist for the new role actually look like?
This Is Our Story: Inside Hearts has, so far at least, failed to answer any of those points. Clearly, Hearts were never going to offer the filmmakers carte blanche access but, by the same token, it isn’t unreasonable to expect a glimpse of the inner workings of a club in crisis.
Instead what we got was a surface- level look at the trials and tribulations in Tynecastle’s corridors of power with little in the way
of substance. The scenes with Gary Locke saw the coach essentially operating as a tour guide and narrator, showing the viewer around the club and explaining what’s going on in that point in time, and worked well as an introduction to the club. But that aside, it’s hard to think of any moments of genuine insight that came to light.
Levein’s interviews were limited to retrospective ones that had the impression they were filmed months after the events took place, meaning we lost out on the manager’s raw reaction to adversity. Instead, we got a reflective take on situations that were months in the making and the immediacy was lost.
The initial instalment of the three- part series had promised a behind- the- scenes look at a club in crisis but in the end, what we were served up was far more akin to a director’s commentary. There was a distinct lack of candid footage of the players, the coaching staff and their methods, and very little in the way of reactive interviews.
Plenty of screen time was taken up by the groundsman explaining how he prepares the pitch for matchday and while it’s nice to see lesser- known staff at the club get their share of the limelight, there are surely more pertinent
– or, indeed, simply more interesting – things that we could have been shown instead as Hearts went to hell in a hand basket.
We got a snippet of just one team talk over the course of the episode, and virtually zero in the way of dressing- room footage. Those hoping to find out a little more about how a club go about appointing a new manager would have been delighted to learn that Hearts received 70 applications to succeed Levein; however, they will have been decidedly less so when Daniel Stendel is decreed the outstanding candidate without the audience being given a glimpse of how that process takes place.
These are surely the exact kind of scenarios that would be a producer’s dream after the project was given the green light, yet we got to see very little of what actually transpired. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem.
This Is Our Story was never going to be have as much glitz or glamour as the similar high- end productions churned out by Netflix and Amazon but what this show could offer was greater access to the filmmakers, away from the legions of PR experts that tend to occupy the media departments of the biggest clubs down south.
The documentary might not come out as slick and polished as those down south, but in the end we didn’t get more than the same expensive adverts for clubs who prefer to gloss over problems.
What we got was a surfacelevel look