Can England ever escape the tentacled ghost of 1966?
One of the criticisms of the former England football manager Fabio Capello when he was given the job was that he couldn’t really speak English. Well, he seems to be quite the phrase-maker now: for it was Capello who, in Managing England: The Impossible Job (BBC Two, Sunday), described England’s 1966 World Cup victory as “the ghost smothering you with its white tentacles”.
Note: “you”. In spite of having managed the nation’s football team for five years from 2007, Capello still sees the English as a strange, confusing people obsessed with, and stymied by, events in the past.
The tentacled ghost of 1966 was the theme that underlay this prolonged, at times agonising autopsy: every manager from Alf Ramsey onwards agreed that, in the eyes of the nation, the Jules Rimet trophy is, as the pop song had it, still gleaming. Its lustre has, the programme suggested, blinded us ever since to the facts – which are that we are mediocre at football.
This was a brilliant documentary, regardless of whether you are a fan of the sport or not. Really, it was a study of the English character, as seen through our treatment of the various gaffers of the national team. There wasn’t much here to make you proud. Taken as a whole, the press and public oscillate between mass delusion and vicious scapegoating.
Structurally, Managing England was a prosaic affair, with just a selection of interviews and snippets from matches bookended with a year and a caption (usually “England failed to qualify”). This simplicity served it well, however – it emphasised just how repetitive and predictable England’s woes are. It would all have been depressing, had it not been pockmarked with iridescent humour – when you have people as watchable and quotable as Sven-göran Eriksson, you just press record and sit back.
As a football fan, I wondered what current England manager Gareth Southgate might glean from his predecessors? Well, that was kind of his predecessors’ point – there’s nothing to be gleaned. The best-laid plans can come undone with an injury, a goalkeeping howler, unseen boardroom wrangling or some ill-advised gobbledygook about a faith healer. If England win, you’re a hero; if – or rather when – they lose, you’re a turnip.
So farewell, then, Hugh Armitage. Much of the second episode of the fourth series of Poldark (BBC One, Sunday) was spent with the handsome Hugh languishing in his sickbed, as doctors covered him in leeches, bled him and trepanned him. Alas, it was all to no avail.
If that was a spoiler, apologies, but think of the upside: no more of Hugh’s snivelling poetry. Even as he carked it, he was churning out doggerel like an 18th-century Dr Seuss. It still beggars belief that Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson) would have fallen for such a wuss.
She’ll get over him, I suspect, because moving briskly on is one of Poldark’s strengths. If you don’t like the slow-motion sequences or the silhouettes of puffy-shirted galloping on clifftops – and I don’t – then you won’t have long to wait for something better.
Something like the toe-sucking vicar Osborne Whitworth, for example, played with relish by Christian Brassington. Whitworth’s face when Morwenna (Ellise Chappell) told him that she wasn’t in fact pregnant, meaning he’d paid her off for nothing, was like he’d got wasabi up his nose.
If the vicar is light relief, the series’ motor remains George and Ross’s battle for supremacy. Writer Debbie Horsfield has become adept at stringing this one out – last night it came in the form of a scrap by proxy, with both George and Ross backing their man in a wrestling match. Ross’s natty brother-in-law Sam (Tom York) took on George’s gamekeeper Tom Harry (Turlough Convery). Everything in Poldark is a metaphor for Ross’s essential decency versus George’s wily manoeuvrings, and the wrestling match was no different: Sam fought fair whereas Tom went straight in with the eye gouge. Tom won the fight but as Ross had insisted that all winnings go to charity, Ross won the day.
Which tends to be what happens in Poldark – later on, there was another Ross/george metaphorical combat, this time for election to parliament. Once again it looked like George would win, until Ross did.
This does leave Poldark at a fork in the road, however. Having been elected, Ross must now go to London, leaving Demelza and Cornwall behind. Can you take the Cornish Show out of Cornwall? I don’t think Ross will be away too long.
Managing England: The Impossible Job ★★★★★ Poldark ★★★★