Back of the net for film set at struggling club
FOOTBALL documentaries are having a moment. After the success of All or Nothing: Tottenham, Sunderland ‘Til I Die, and the like, filmmakers are alive to the fact that football clubs are home to some great stories. Whatever happens, there is a guaranteed, often global, audience waiting to see the results – one, moreover, that is prepared to pay.
Fans can have their pick from two new offerings next week: one paid for and the other not (unless you count the TV licence).
Welcome to Wrexham (Disney+, from August 25)
is the glamour tie of the two, being the story of what happened after Hollywood star Ryan Reynolds, and fellow actor and friend, Rob McElhenney, bought Wrexham FC.
The other film has been made for a fraction of the Welcome to Wrexham budget, but matches it for heart. In 2019 Alex Gale, with David MacCormack, made the award-winning The Fort, a film about struggling Fort William FC. Now Gale is back with a follow up,
Fight at the Fort (BBC Scotland, Tuesday, 10pm).
New chairman, John Trew, has a triple mission. One: sort out the pitch. Stunning location, with Ben Nevis in background, but it is unplayable. Two: hire a new manager. Three: save the club from relegation.
The new manager is Shadab Iftikhar from Preston, whose cv includes stints at Samoa (unpaid) and Mongolia. The 31-year-old can certainly talk the talk – “This will be the greatest underdog story ever” – but can he back it up with results?
A 16-strong squad of new recruits is drafted in from all over the country, each one hoping to make their mark. Iftikhar is not the only dreamer in the pack. “Five years’ time I’ll be in the Premier League,” says one player gazing at the horizon.
Iftikhar doesn’t have his problems to seek. With the pitch continuing to fail inspection the team are forced to play every game away from home. That means hundreds of miles travelling once or twice each week, and some of the team are holding down full time jobs as well.
It doesn’t take a Postecoglou or a van Bronckhorst to imagine how the season plays out from here, but that takes nothing away from the drama. There are some smashing characters here and Gale brings out the personalities and various sub-plots with skill, judgement, and an eye for the absurd (always handy to have around when dealing with anything to do with football).
Michael Portillo doesn’t seem like the footballing type, though I could be wrong. The former Tory Minister seems to have spent his life since leaving politics reinventing himself, chiefly as a presenter of travelogues.
The Pyrenees with Michael Portillo (Channel 5, Tuesday, 9pm) is a slight change from his norm in that he’s on Shanks’s pony here rather than a train. It is also one of his most personal films, “a journey of selfdiscovery” as he calls it, taken to mark his turning 70 next year.
For part of the route, Portillo will be walking in the footsteps of his father, a left-wing academic who fled Franco’s Spain in 1939.
Luis Gabriel Portillo ended up in Oxford, where he met a Scottish woman, Cora, who was helping refugee children to settle. “My mother proposed to him,” says Portillo with a flourish. “Here I am.”
It is an arduous trek in parts, particularly for someone who confesses from the off to being “no mountaineer” and has an arthritic hip.
But there is lot of stopping off to have lunch and meet the locals. One is a retired bootlegger who takes him on one of the old smuggling routes through the hills. The pair stop for a traditional snack, a piece of chocolate between two slices of bread, that you may want to add to your own repertoire (I certainly have).
As you might expect, Portillo is excellent on the often complex political history of the country and the vast differences between regions. By the end of
As you might expect, Portillo is excellent on the often complex political history of the country and the vast differences between regions
the first of four episodes he is heading towards the Camino de Santiago. He first undertook the pilgrimage as his political career was coming to a close and he was searching for what to do next. Though as he tells us, the first rule of the Camino de Santiago is that you do not ask your fellow travellers why they are walking the route.
This is MY House (BBC1, Friday, 8.30pm) comes to Pollokshields in Glasgow this week, where four women named Ellie compete to convince a celebrity panel that they are the real owner of the property in question, in this case, a very modishly decorated ex-council flat. It’s a tricky one this week, with two highly convincing contenders from the off. On hand to ask the questions and choose the right Ellie are Harry Hill, Judi Love, Richard Madeley and Shaun Ryder. Chaos and laughter ensue.