Fellowes scores with drama about the birth of football
There’s a football match going on, but not as we know it. Lots of strapping toffs shouting, “Well played, Arthur!” while wearing immaculate cream trousers. This is the beautiful game as it was in 1879, a sport dominated by Old Etonians. Once they’ve finished playing, they go home to white-tie dinners where they sit around the table with sparky ladies in taffeta, and I think we all know who that calls for, don’t we? Downton Abbey’s Julian Fellowes, of course.
The English Game (Netflix) is the second Fellowes drama to be launched in a week, hard on the heels of ITV’S Belgravia. I liked Belgravia, but the first episode of this instantly struck me as more fun. There are only so many candelabras and drawing room conversations that a person can take, and the football scenes in The English Game have a welcome freshness and vigour.
Fellowes would be the first to admit that he is no expert on football – he once told me that his son had taken him to watch Manchester United play “either East Ham or West Ham” – but he doesn’t need to be. The English Game may on one level be about the birth of modern football but it is really about class, and that’s something Fellowes claims as his specialist subject.
When the drama begins, football appears to have more in common with rugby. Then along comes Fergus Suter, a Scot paid by a mill owner in Darwen, Lancashire, to join his team and “knock these posh bastards off their perch”. The working-class characters talk like that, just as the Old Etonians bluster: “This is a game for amateurs and gentlemen.” Subtle it is not. But subtlety doesn’t work too well in costume dramas anyway. Instead, Fellowes wastes no time in marking out the heroes and villains – the latter helpfully have twirly moustaches – and giving us two lead characters to invest in. Suter is played by Kevin Guthrie as a scrappy terrier going up against Edward Holcroft’s majestic Arthur Kinnaird, then the superstar footballer of his day. I’m not sure if the real Kinnaird was doorstepped by reporters and adoring little autograph hunters, but it’s an easy way to illustrate his status.
History tells us that Suter became the first recognised professional footballer of his day. Did he singlehandedly transform the English game by importing his revolutionary Scottish methods of passing the ball, playing in a pyramid formation and hitting them on the break? The script would certainly like us to think so. There are plenty of amusing references to the gulf between football then and now. “Clearly they’re being paid,” one of the Old Etonians says of Suter and his fellow Scot, Jimmy Love (James Harkness). “To play football?!” replies his disbelieving teammate. Oh, chaps. If you could only see how it all turned out.
Interestingly, it is the former public schoolboys who play dirty, while the millworkers adopt an elegant passing game. Most of the posh characters are cartoon baddies, but there are signs that Kinnaird is an honourable sort. He even listens to his wife when she tells him how disappointed she is in his behaviour, which struck me as a bit New Man for the 1870s, although not as much as the scene in which a sad-eyed Kinnaird complains that his father spent too much time working and didn’t play with him enough as a child. As the show goes on – it is in six parts, all available from today – he starts to see the injustice in a world of haves and have-nots.
It all looks suitably lavish for a show made on a Netflix budget, with the Yorkshire village of Saltaire standing in for Darwen (eagle-eyed viewers will have spotted the same location in the BBC adaptation of The ABC Murders). There is good support from Craig Parkinson as mill boss James Walsh, coping manfully with expository dialogue (“Your passing game is the future of football!”), and from the always-excellent Harkness as Suter’s compatriot. And if all the football stuff feels a bit too manly – there are an awful lot of beards – both Scots get a love interest and Kinnaird’s wife proves to be the kind of strong female character Fellowes can turn out in his sleep.
The series credits co-writers Tony Charles, Oliver Cotton and Ben Vanstone, and it’s not clear how the workload was divided, but Netflix has been sure to promote this as a Julian Fellowes creation. Later episodes can get a bit too bogged down in trouble at the mill, with striking workers railing against wage cuts. But as soon as the action cuts to the football field and Darwen’s irresistible path to glory, it feels like a winner.
The English Game ★★★★