Langer channels the spirit of Brent in ‘The Test’
Real life imitates farce as Amazon goes behind the scenes with Australia cricket, writes Alan Tyers
‘No abuse. We can be fierce, but we can still be good blokes’
The spectre of one figure looms over Amazon’s eight-part documentary series
The Test about Justin Langer’s project to restore the Australia cricket team to its former glory. That figure is not Steve Waugh, Steve Smith, or even John Buchanan or Shane Warne. It is David Brent.
Ricky Gervais’s middle-management grotesque has made these sort of behind-the-scenes documentaries, 17 years on from The Office, almost unwatchably hyperaware. Building on the work of Christopher Guest with his Rob Reiner-directed This Is Spinal Tap and then Best In Show et al, Gervais explored something universal about men given a bit of power, how groups respond, and the enormous, empty chasm where self-awareness ought to be – that yawning gulf between the character speaking and the effect he has on the audience, both those present in the room and us watching at further remove on screen.
In this unintentional Australian reimagining of The Office, the role of Brent is, of course, taken by Langer. And where Gervais and his cameras had the masterful deadpan reaction shots of Martin Freeman and Lucy Davis, we have the unfortunate drongos who constitute the Australia men’s cricket team from 2018 to the present day, who sit there listening blankly to Langer’s barrage of gimlet-eyed positivity, elite mateship, and chipper, chippy exhortations about the Baggy Green.
The Amazon cameras have access to all of this: training sessions and dressing rooms, team meetings, team-values meetings. For Langer, who was appointed head coach in the aftermath of the sandpaper cheating affair that grew into a global psychodrama and mawkish, bizarre extravaganza of national breast-beating, it is all about so much more than the hitting, bowling and catching of cricket balls.
“It is not just about how we play cricket, but how we are as Australians,” Langer solemnly declares, and then ,“it is not just about being great cricketers. It is about being a great person,” Is it, though? Is it? Who asked them to be this, other than the branding arm of the dead-eyed corporate machine that is Cricket Australia? Were people not, in fact, very happy for a hundred years and more with their team being the best at cricket, keeping the gamesmanship more or less in check and crushing the whinging Poms?
Like Amazon’s Manchester City series, All Or Nothing, this is a sanctioned, in-house effort, whose presumed goal of bringing fans closer to their heroes paradoxically has the opposite effect, making their sporting lives seem remoter, less real, more hermetically sealed, more… just more full of total cobblers.
It is not a spoiler to tell you that there is a trip to France and Belgium to visit some First World War graves, because (a) obviously, of course, there is and (b) like a lot of these sporting documentaries, we already know what happens, because we watched the matches and saw the interviews and read the reports when the events happened.
There are invocations of the Anzac spirit, there are insistences that “if we have got good behaviours then we have got good cultures”. He’s a chilledout entertainer, is JL. The thorny question of sledging is met head on, and it does not help the “Officey” vibe that Langer here addresses his remarks to “Finchy”, who is not, in this case, a “bloody good rep” but, in fact, boom-or-bust, white-ball batsman Aaron Finch.
“How about this for an idea, Painey, Finchy? From this day forward, no more abuse. Simple.” Aw, what does that mean, JL? “It means no abuse. But I want to see plenty of banter and talk. We can be fierce, but we can still be good blokes.”
A few minutes later, we see Langer tearing a strip off the team in an expletive-laden postdefeat rant. JL, you absolute classic.
To this viewer, the whole spectacle is hootingly ludicrous and of most interest as a marker of where Big Sport is in the year 2020: teams trading some entrance to the dressing room in exchange for a sanitised, on-message whitewash, parping about brand values and ethos, and beaming it into the faceholes of the punters via a global, supranational streaming giant. Is this what sport fans actually want?
That, as Brent himself declared, is the real quiz.