The Busby Babes - ITV, Sunday
Home Truths - BBC 1, Wednesday
McCarthy's Park - RTE 1, Wednesday
Remember Bloody Sunday - BBC 1, Sunday, RTE 1, Monday, RTE 1, Thursday
Since Rupert Murdoch's Sky Sports ran off with the football, terrestrial telly has had to become more inventive in its sports programming. This week, the 40th anniversary of Manchester United's Munich air disaster, saw two documentaries on the club and, three months after Ireland's Brussels disaster, (however insignificant that was in comparison), RTE screened a portrait of manager Mick McCarthy. For feature film fans, Julie Welch's Those Glory, Glory Days reminded older viewers (and probably surprised younger ones) that Tottenham used to be able to play football.
Sports documentaries, sports quiz shows, sports chat shows, sports magazine shows and satirical sports shows are firmly established. Sports news is an integral part of all the major news bulletins and even sports films are increasingly common. There are many reasons for this explosion of coverage: more channels (with more cameras and TV technology); the lure to business people of profit and profile; consumer affluence; high-powered, heavily-hyped advertising; choreographed hysteria; and even the relative absence, so characteristic of the 1990s, of competing political ideologies. With political passions stifled, sports passions are easily inflated and the marketeers have provided profitable conduits.
Football then, in a sense, has become for the 1990s what pop music was for the 1960s. It is anthemic for the spirit of the times. Its antagonisms are deep but, unlike the sentiments of the best 1960s music, not threatening to the status quo. Indeed, it is this aspect of sport's media explosion which gives rise to complaints of "bread and circuses". More than ever, politicians and pop stars seek to be associated with particular soccer clubs: the politicians, in particular, thrive on such public displays of that old vote-catcher, the "common touch".
The Busby Babes: End Of A Dream recounted the lead-up to and the immediate aftermath of the Munich crash. It reminded you of how different not only football but air travel was 40 years ago. The year before the disaster, United players returning from playing Athletico Bilbao had had to sweep ice off the wings of their plane. It is unimaginable now that Keane, Giggs, Cole, Beckham, Sheringham and the rest would be given sweeping brushes to facilitate take-off.
Equally unimaginable, especially in a week when it was reported that Liverpool's Robbie Fowler nets weekly wages of £50,000, are the pay packets of Busby's Babes: they averaged about £15 each. Among the talking heads recalling the tragedy, Jimmy Savile pointed out that the young team coincided with "the birth of the teenager" in the 1950s. But there is another legacy to the Busby Babes: in being the first English team to compete in the European Cup, they ruptured a Little Englander attitude about football and the Continent.
Chelsea, who won the Football League in 1955, had declined the invitation to play in Europe. However, such typical London Euroscepticism did not grip Catholic Scot Busby. He could see the future, especially as England had been hammered 6-3 at Wembley a few years earlier by Hungary. His decision to buck his own league's powers by playing in Europe was, as such, a victory for provincial England. The deaths at Munich probably made his team the most loved in the world and at the time catapulted Manchester United above Arsenal as the pre-eminent football club of England.
There was little new in The Busby Babes, although details such as former policeman Tom Potter recalling "smelling the varnish on the coffins" at Manchester airport were evocative. Perhaps most telling of all, though, was Duncan Edwards's mother, Ann. It was clear that Mrs Edwards does not live in high luxury and that much of her life has been a struggle. In the era of the millionaire footballer, the deep worry-lines on her forehead spoke volumes about, for all its celebration of communality, the game's less-than-caring character.
Home Truths: Glory, Glory Days (not to be confused with Julie Welch's excessively coy and sentimental film of the same name) examined the relationship between United and Ireland. This first of two instalments looked at the North. The second will concentrate on the Republic. As the English club which has provided the most Republic of Ireland internationals and also played a stream of brilliant Northerners including, of course, the incomparable George Best, perhaps they have a mixing formula which could be used to save the peace process from being wound up.
The other major football documentary of the week was McCarthy's Park, filmed over 15 months of Mick McCarthy's team as it tried to qualify for this year's World Cup Finals in France. Written by Tom Humphries, who plays on the Hill 16 end of this newspaper, it was a revealing account of a manager under pressure. "I don't think there's ever been an off-therecord comment in my life," said McCarthy at one stage and it was clear that he has a grim relationship with the media.
The documentary followed Ireland through eight countries and 14 matches. Reactions after the embarrassment of Macedonia and the crucial wins in Iceland and Lithuania contrasted even more sharply than the performances. It reminded you that in sport - at least in professional sport - nothing counts but winning. "The line between success and failure is very thin," said McCarthy at one point, adding: "It's eight yards long and about three inches wide" - the dimensions of the goal line.
Narrated by Michelle O'Connor, McCarthy's Park wisely allowed the camera and the principals to tell the story. Its script was crisp, giving the action room to breathe. There was the usual football effing and blinding, of course, although there was no line quite as memorable as former England manager Graham Taylor's "Do I not like that?". But, as a portrait of McCarthy, it did show a man desperate to impose an authority in excess of his managerial experience. Pointedly, Mick refused to talk about his infamous bust-up with Paul McGrath.
Not unexpectedly, the ghost of Jack Charlton hovered throughout. McCarthy stressed how he had always followed Charlton's instructions to the limit and, though he wished his own team to play differently, expected similar "loyalty" in return. But "loyalty" here really meant discipline. Part of the problem for McCarthy, apart from losing some of our best players through age, was that discipline in his more expansive strategies was more difficult than it had been under Charlton's "infliction" tactics.
After the 2-1 defeat in the playoff game away to Belgium Mick was, by his own admission, "livid and seething". He kicked a coffee pot around the dressing room. A little earlier he had said, ambiguously but probably truthfully, that he regretted "not talking to Wolves" before he was offered the Irish job. Now, the wolves he dislikes talking to are in the media. A bad run in the European Championship qualifiers and Mick McCarthy will be levelled like the statues of Lenin and Stalin, tellingly filmed as scene-setters before Ireland played in Lithuania.
There is, because of the huge popularity of football, increasing interest in behind-the-scenes exposes. As long ago as the 1960 Eamon Dunphy's Only A Game? - a diary account of backroom Millwall - recognised the value of, and interest in, this genre. Though McCarthy's Park was not quite an "access all areas" documentary, it did show how football management is not for those whose main aim is to win friends, whatever about influencing people. A strong, if not quite cupwinning performance, from the Setanta Sport production company.
Originally shown in 1992, on the 20th anniversary of the killings/murders, Remember Bloody Sunday was more chilling than any of the accounts of the Munich air crash. The more you listened, the clearer it became that the 14 deaths were no accident. Dr Edward Daly used the word "murdered" without hesitation and, even on the rather gently, gently evidence presented by this programme, it was difficult to doubt him.
"Quite honestly, I owned the Bogside at that stage. In military terms, I occupied it," said Derek Wilford, paratroop commander for the killings. The proprietorial "I", disconcerting at the best of times, sounded thoroughly vile in this context. "I can't accept that my soldiers were wrong," continued Wilford. Again, the "my" soldiers, though less jarringly than the "I owned the Bogside", revealed a landlordly tone.
Anyway, after killing or wounding about 30 unarmed people, the mood among the paras was, said Wilford, "not elation but of a job well done". Perhaps in terms of carrying out orders, it was "a job well done". But it was also the best job ever done for the Provisional IRA. On political instruction, the paras were there "to teach (the natives!) a lesson" - to shoot resistance into subjugation.
It didn't work, but without the presence of TV cameras, the lies told by the killers and their masters would have been even more unspeakable. With bombing attacks on Iraq looming closer by the day, expect television not to admit that, in any such action, it is controlled by the military. Horrific civilian deaths on a vast scale are likely to ensue, but the killers have learned that if you can keep them out of sight, you can pretty well do as you please.
Finally, two further RTE documentaries: True Lives - Somewhere To Hang Your Hat and Undercover. The former was written and presented by Stanley Price. As a portrait of Irish Jewry between the 1880s and the present, it took the form of a quest by its author to retrace the steps of his immigrant grandparents, who fled pogroms in Lithuania. Using official records, anecdotes, dramatic reconstructions and interviews, it was a fond portrait of Dublin's Jewish community, which has now shrunk from a 1930s high of about 5,000 to 1,000.
Price's Dublin was that of "medicine and rugby", a professional and class elite, but he was aware of its anti-Semitism too. Many tennis clubs and golf clubs would not allow Jews to become members, scotching the myth that racism here is just some new byproduct of the Celtic Tiger. Anyway, as authored documentaries go, this one was loving without being cloying, although the veneration and interpretation of James Joyce's Leopold Bloom (an Irish Jew) was rather excessive and overworked.
Undercover featured Dermot Bolger, described as a poet, playwright, novelist, editor and publisher. That's fair enough, for whatever about the variable quality of Bolger's work, the very fact that he produces so much makes him a kind of Dublin anti-writer. In a city where so many "writers" talk but don't write, Bolger's output alone deserved this programme. Though he has, for now anyway, been trumped by Roddy Doyle as the chronicler of urban Ireland, some of his work, most notably his bleak novel The Journey Home, is first rate.