Never mind Becks, the kids are the true stars here
There have been a lot of football stories on TV in the last few years. This is in marked contrast to previous decades where football as drama was dead ground (see Dream Team, or the Goal franchise). The fact was that football itself had all the drama you could want – you couldn’t, and shouldn’t, make it up.
But recently, in both fiction and nonfiction, television has found a way to parley with the world’s most popular game. Sunderland ’Til I Die, Ted Lasso and latterly Disney’s own Welcome to Wrexham have shown that the good football stories are all to be found not in glamour and success, but in the backwaters. It’s the no-hopers who dared to hope, the communities besotted with their small-town teams, the individuals who make up those communities and those teams that provide the stories we yearn for.
Enter, somewhat late to the game, David Beckham. Save Our Squad (Disney+) sees Becks, who was raised in Chingford, fly in to mentor a struggling east London U14 side. As always with this kind of experiment, the question that lingers is why? And to be fair to Beckham he answers it head on in episode one: “I wanted to work with a team in this league because this is where it all began for me. So that’s why I’m back.”
Alas, Westward Boys under-14s appear as unconvinced as I am by his apparent motivation. They’re a very likeable, watchable bunch and inevitably you find yourself rooting for them. Football, it scarcely needs stressing, is a really good game and so the on-pitch sequences where triumph follows set-back, beautiful goal follows easy-miss, are irresistible.
But Beckham doesn’t add much. He was always better known for his right foot than his charisma, and no amount of edit-suite magic is able to transform him from a perfectly pleasant megastar into a dressing-room inspiration. There’s a painful scene where Beckham tells a shy, new squad member about how he too once had to deal with difficult new surroundings. It was when he moved from Man United to Real Madrid, he adds.
The true stars of Save Our Squad are the two Westward coaches who slave away trying to get a group of lads who’ve had Disney’s cameras stuck in their faces to focus on playing football. I will of course be watching the rest of it to see if Westward can stave off relegation, but that’s the allure of football, not TV.
T
here is no harder comedy to review than Two Doors Down
(BBC Two) because nothing happens, everything stays the same, the characters all behave exactly as you would expect and the jokes couldn’t be more signposted if they were printed on billboards.
Or at least that was the form for five series. Series six, however, which began last night, opened with a bombshell: Cathy, played by Doon Mackichan, has left Colin for an estate agent in Sharm El Sheikh.
This cast change, prompted by Mackichan upping sticks for reasons unknown, gave Two Doors Down an opportunity as well as a problem. The opportunity was to give the ever-excellent Jonathan Watson, who plays Cathy’s hapless husband Colin, something to work with. He didn’t disappoint, appearing on the doorstep with half a takeaway down his front and slowly admitting that he hadn’t left the house since Cathy’s elopement. Down-in-the-mouth Colin was a delight as he basically ceased to function, leading to one superb scene where Beth (Arabella Weir) tried to show him how to make macaroni cheese, and Colin stood dumbstruck as if she was conjugating Swahili.
The problem, slightly predictably, was that Doon Mackichan was the funniest thing in Two Doors Down – without her it lagged horribly (and I have to say that even with her it was never the peppiest of sitcoms). Credit should go to the writers, Simon Carlyle and Gregor Sharp, for confronting the elephant in the room, as well as the cast, who as ever made a lot out of not much: practically the whole of the episode consisted of Beth, Eric (Alex Norton), Gordon (Kieran Hodgson) and Ian (Jamie Quinn) talking about Cathy, with no-filter battleaxe Christine (Elaine C Smith) chipping in with her usual delicacies (“So, is she away with somebody else or has she just had enough?”).
But Two Doors Down relied on Cathy for incident, visual humour and punchlines. She was the show’s Dorien Green (if you’re a Birds of a Feather fan) or Kramer (if Seinfeld, another show about nothing, is more your bag). It’s fine to remove her for a single episode in which her absence remains the main story, but for the balance of the show – for the jokes, frankly – she needs replacing, fast.
Two Doors Down ★★ Save Our Squad ★★★