The Beautiful Frame
With the World Cup underway (I'm watching South Africa v. Mexico in another browser window as I type this, having waited until 3pm for my lunch hour so I can catch the whole first half), I've decided to do a bit of blogging about football over the next couple of weeks. Not so much about the on-field happenings of the game itself - there are plenty of other places where people do that better than I could - but instead in the cultural and contextual aspects of the sport that particularly interest me. Next week, I'll be doing a series of posts about various football songs, while after that I may pop up with some brief musings on topics such as football stickers, Subbuteo, kits, and that sort of thing.
For now, though, I wanted to link to a video. In 1994, BBC2 ran a theme night called "Goal TV". This was back in the infancy of the TV "theme night" concept, and unlike some of the lazy efforts that would later characterise the genre, "Goal TV" had proper thought and care put into it. It ran for bloody hours, and had some lovely, specially-crafted continuity inbetween segments. It had longer and shorter programmes, including a brilliant Nick Hornby-narrated documentary on the game's appeal called "The Ball is Round", a musing on goalkeepers called "L'Etranger", that Likely Lads episode, the 1966 film Goal!, and that sort of thing - as well as being interspersed with little two- or three-minute highlight packages of some classic World Cup games and a "Greatest Goal Ever Scored" phone vote (Maradona '86 won). It had a very When Saturday Comes sort of feel to it - in that it was a bit intelligent, and was about a general appreciation of the game and its rich and varied culture and history, rather than descending into the laddishness, flag-waving or tribalism that often sadly blight it. Basically, it was fantastic, and I watched it - or its constituent parts - many many times on a taped copy that for a good decade or more has now sadly been lost to the ages.
I've tried for years to track down a copy online - either to download or even to buy on tape - but sadly very little reference to it exists. Which is why finding this rather daft but fun 20-minute programme called The Beautiful Frame, in which Clare Grogan looks at the checkered history of football's relationship with film and TV, was such a joy. It's a bit cheap and cheesy, but it's still pretty enjoyable, and was the first time I'd heard of things like Jossy's Giants. Pleasingly, the clip also includes the accompanying section of the aforementioned lovely continuity. Despite dating from two years after the Premier League's formation, there's a pleasant sense of pre-Sky innocence about the whole thing, and if the World Cup has got you in an all-things-football kind of mood, it's well worth a look. Er, once this game's finished, anyway.
Originally posted at seblog.co.uk. You can comment here or there.