PARKHEAD DOCUMENTARY WOULD BE A PRIME OPPORTUNITY

It’s a tale of perfect harmony, played out under the bright lights of Paradise...

FAIR PLAY to Amazon Prime. If early reviews are anything to go by, they’ve hit the jackpot with All Or Nothing, the eight-part documentary on Manchester City’s record-breaking 2017-18 season. Here’s the problem with reality TV, though. There’s a beast out there that needs to be fed. What you did last time has to be bigger, brasher, more bonkers next time.

Big Brother began as a worthy social experiment and, even when boiled down to making a conveyor belt of unfortunates walk the plank into the various stages of mental collapse, still found itself overtaken by Christopher Biggins and Joe Pasquale eating a dingo’s ding-a-ling in the jungle, egged on by a pair of Geordie dwarves.

It never stops, though. The quest to go further, to crank it up to 11.

Jump forward a year or two and you’ve sleepwalked into sitting on the couch with your children as the comings and goings of an open-air knocking shop called Love Island play out on the flickering box in the corner of the room.

Pep Guardiola’s tactic talks on the way to his first Premier League title will do for now, but how can we take fly-on-the-wall football to the next level?

We need a family at war, a Macbeth figure consumed by his ambition, lynch mobs, squabbles over money, Greek tragedy and a scheming Bond villain with a foreign-sounding name. Something exotic. Like, say, Jacques Lichtenstein.

In short, we need Celtic. Sure, you’d never have marked them out as prime soap opera material a fortnight back, all sweetness and light and Double Trebles.

But look at it now. Brendan Rodgers hitting out at the board and then denying he’d done anything of the sort just as El Dorado went terminado and £30million of Champions League gold slid down the toilet. His assistant Chris Davies identifying the real culprits behind two weeks of chaos, soft goals, botched transfers and Boyatagate: the Scottish media. Of course.

It’s not too late to get the cameras in, you know. Not too late to get next year’s blockbuster in the can. From All Or Nothing to

Gall & Bluffing. The sales pitch goes something like this:

ALL shows need a hook. Something to drag in a guaranteed audience, to pander to the base instincts of the mob. Where better to start, then, than Chris Davies’ Friday press conference?

We fade from an opening sequence, played out to a Gaelic lament, that runs through Rodgers having a go over fouled-up transfers, Dedryck Boyata broadcasting from the treatment table to the world on Instagram after his manager had turned down £10m from Fulham and said he was fit to play and the inevitable Boyata-free defence in Athens standing around watching the grass grow as AEK bounce them out of the Champions League.

Everything is ‘fine’, reports a chirpy Davies. ‘There’s been no fallouts with the board. It’s a story the media are trying to generate, but it’s not there.’

Aye, the mainstream media (otherwise known as the SMMSSM, or something). What about them, eh? Broadcasting what Rodgers says in public, about being offski if he can’t push forward, and reporting his refusal to answer properly when asked whether the directors share his vision.

All clever editing and hidden agendas. Trump’s right. Not to be trusted.

Cut to fearless blogger Sevco O’Toole, renowned for his dedicated football finance website www.thereisnooldfirm.com. He will lead the lynch mob against these enemies of truth.

Given his painstaking work on EBTs, HMRC and the minutiae of Dave King’s upcoming share issue at Rangers, he may also be able to explain why a club with £90m in revenue in 2017 and £76m in operating costs must carry on spending untold millions on ever more players with a £30m Champions League-sized hole in the accounts. Mind you, that might confuse the narrative.

He’s ‘lynch mob man’. He’ll tell all about the poisoned workings of the SMMSSM. At the moment, though, he’s busy outside Celtic Park with his pitchfork, his torch and a spray-painted bedsheet bearing the words: ‘No More Biscuit Tin’.

Chief executive Peter Lawwell is inside, in his office, taking his mind off being convinced by Rodgers to turn down that loony money from Fulham for Boyata by flashing his brand, spanking new disco lights on and off and blasting some Jean-Michel Jarre over the speakers. If nothing else, it drowns out the sound of Boyata’s agent Lichtenstein shouting up the stairs from the foyer while being restrained by a foam-flecked phalanx of security guards considerably less porous than the current Celtic defence.

It was Lichtenstein who accused Celtic of consigning his client to a life of pain, destroying his dreams, not picking up the phone, nothing. And the SMMSSM reported it. A conjoining of evil spirits, like Macbeth’s witches, conspiring to bring down great things and great men.

‘There is no point vilifying anybody or blaming one individual,’ says Davies as the discredited Boyata is banished to training with the Under-20s outside. ‘Part of that process will be ensuring we are together as one.’

Ahhhh… sounds like a great S Club 7 lyric. Might be worth bearing that in mind for the soundtrack too.

Rodgers knows how to treat Lichtenstein all right, leaving him downstairs in the main reception at Lennoxtown, slavering at the kitchen staff about how a man’s word should be his bond.

Rodgers, like Guardiola, will be the shining light of this masterpiece, his aura illuminating every frame like no £2m collection of top-of-the-range stadium lighting apparatus ever could.

This is a man unfazed by transparent attempts to damage the unbreakable unity of the Celtic family, focused on securing the one true legacy he detailed on the day he spoke of Rangers fans stopping in the Clyde Tunnel to hail his brilliance. Ten-In-A-Row is one thing. The blessed Brendan, lest we forget, is also on a mission to end Scotland’s sectarian divide.

He knows how these documentaries work. Remember Being: Liverpool? Remember the names of the players who would let him down contained in those envelopes or the team talk directed at a bemused Lucas Leiva?

He is TV gold when delivering his message. And he will cook up so much more soul food on this journey to the Promised Land.

Like the planned peace vigil with Kyle Lafferty and Allan McGregor — beautiful humans with beautiful smiles — outside Ibrox on the eve of the last Old Firm game of the season. In the documentary’s crescendo, he will arrive on Edmiston Drive, hoisted aloft in a gilded carriage by the members of the Union Bears, as the Light Blues’ Nine-In-A-Row heroes, their own place in history consigned to the margins, scatter rose petals below.

There will be darkness in this uplifting tale, though. Rodgers will have to confront a dark figure from his past. Quieter than Lichtenstein, but already muttering in the background ahead of the great day of reckoning.

As Davies scotches silly concerns over a lack of synergy in his Friday address, Steven Gerrard is across town making mischief.

‘You won’t hear any excuses from us,’ says the Rangers manager when asked about combining league games and Europe. Quizzed on a prominent player being diverted by transfer interest, he smiles: ‘My job is to manage the situation and tell him how much he’s loved here.’

A nod to Boyatagate? Another little shot across the bows? Well, it’s only the beginning. An entrée in an ever-unfolding feast of lunacy and paranoia served up as sport.

We’ll set up the cameras and the subscription fees. You only need to reach for the popcorn.