Football and Comedy: Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads (1973)

Football and comedy. Mention the two words together in a conversation with a football fan and you'll often get the same response: 'Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads.'

The reason is simple. As British sitcoms go, very few encapsulate the dedication to football and the mental anguish of the common supporter like the episode entitled 'No Hiding Place.' For those of you unfamiliar with  this TV classic, here's the back story.

Terry Collier (played by James Bolam) and Bob Ferris (Rodney Bewes) are old pals that grew up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Having enjoyed and endured a relationship of virtual brotherhood for many years, their time together reached a temporary hiatus when Collier joined the army and travelled abroad as a result of his military service.

Five years on, Collier returns home to Newcastle and is reunited with his old pal Ferris, but their home town has changed beyond comprehension. Many of the old buildings have been pulled down, former friends have moved on and the swinging Sixties have made way for the sensible Seventies. Terry is struggling to understand what has happened to the world he left behind, and when we pick up the story in this episode, even a trip to a hairdressing salon proves to be an eye-opening experience...



00:00
Surely one of the greatest TV theme tunes of all time, accompanied by a title sequence that illustrates the history of Bob and Terry's friendship. Their younger years featured in The Likely Lads which ran for three series on BBC television between 1964 and 1966. Some of the pictures shown in the titles derive from this series.

00:30
A never-more-70s hairdressing boutique welcomes the arrival of Bob and Terry, the latter alarmed that (a) it's not a barber's shop anymore, (b) women work there, and (c) getting your hair washed appears to be the new norm. As for manicures...

03:08
The first mention of football as Gary, one of the hairdressers, asks Bob who he thinks will win the Bulgaria v England match taking place that day. It's a lunchtime kick-off, but highlights of the game aren't due to be shown until that same evening. Ah yes, those dark, distant days when even an international match wasn't guaranteed to be shown live on TV...

Terry and Bob are planning to avoid the score all day in the hope of adding some excitement to their televisual banquet later that night, but will they make it?

04:54
In through the door walks Flint, an acquaintance of Bob and Terry and a man they can well do without seeing. Flint almost lets slip the latest news from Bulgaria, but our desperate duo exit quickly from the salon before hearing something unfortunate.

Incidentally, Flint is played by Brian Glover, a well-known actor back in the day and someone with his own football connections having played PE teacher Mr Sugden in the film Kes.

05:36
Oh dear - the secret's out... "2-0!" shouts Flint as Bob and Terry flee the scene. They arrive at their favourite pub, The Black Horse and come to terms with what they've just heard. Here we get a great piece of dialogue about the way football scores are discussed. "People don't go around saying 'nil-two' do they?" says, Bob, and you have to admit, he's got a point...

Luckily for the fellas, it's all a ruse; the match hasn't even kicked off yet, and Flint was merely pulling their leg. What a rotten thing to do...

06:37
Time for some casual international stereotyping now as Terry discusses the dubious qualities of Britain's foreign neighbours. Be it Koreans, Russians, Egyptians, Italians, French, Germans, Spaniards, Danes or Americans, they've all got negative qualities that Collier can't stand.

Such matters are cast aside, however, when Flint walks in and bets the lads that they won't be able to avoid the score until 10.20pm. Their first test comes when Flint turns on his portable radio...

10:55
Bob and Terry take refuge at the home of Audrey, Terry's sister. Further insinuations ensue about the ability of the Bulgarians to provide a decent playing surface for football along with various references to Enoch Powell and Pan's People that date the episode beautifully.

And then the phone rings... Audrey goes to answer it, but the boys are too shrewd and don't bother waiting to find out who's on the other end of the line. Just as well - it sounds like Flint...

15:15
The local church is the next place of sanctuary for Bob and Terry, but there's still six hours to pass and desperate times call for desperate measures. Personal confessions, games of I Spy and the Eurovision Song Contest are all discussed, but yet again Flint arrives to cause panic where once was calm.

The sequence ends with another topical football reference as Flint delivers 'The Gospel According To Sir Alf'.

22:13
Further problems arise as Bob drives the pair home in his car past a TV rental shop and then a one-legged news vendor bearing a placard. But what will it say? 'England Victory'? 'England Flop'? Time for some excellent ingenuity on the part of our persecuted motorists...

23:29
Finally Bob and Terry arrive back at Bob's new house to watch the match. With less than ten minutes to go, their frustrating ordeal appears to be at an end. With bottles of beer at the ready, their relief at having avoided the score - and Flint - is palpable... but Flint finds a way to collect his winnings in the end.

27:26
It's the moment they've both been waiting for and the TV's switched on. Football awaits... but who's this? It's Corbett Woodall, one time BBC newsreader who throughout the Seventies reprised his role in a number of programmes including Steptoe and Son and The Goodies.

Unfortunately on this occasion, he's the bearer of bad news. Instead of European football, they're about to see the European Figure Skating Championships. Suddenly, that 'England F...' headline makes sense - much to the disdain of The Likely Lads.

I've Got Stripes: The five most wretched striped football shirts of all time

Ed Carter returns with a fabulous guest post all about the place of the striped shirt in football history...

Listeners to the latest Football Attic podcast will now be fully aware that I have become part of the problem. The problem, specifically, is the way the world of football fans dotes on the Peru international kit. But we love sashes. Sashes on kits are brilliant things and, moreover very difficult to mess up.

Stripes, on the other hand, are a different matter. My own team are Brighton and Hove Albion, so I dote on striped shirts. Brighton of course once famously had a kit with striped shorts as well, by way of demonstrating the massive inadvisability of doing that.

There's another magical aspect to striped football shirts of a sort unrelated to sartorial concerns: teams who wear them underachieve magnificently. The last time a team who wore stripes as their first choice kit won the English football league championship was Sunderland in 1935/36 and the last FA Cup winner in stripes were the largely otherwise stripe-free Coventry City in 1987. The last team who are regular striped shirt wearers to prevail in football's oldest competition: Southampton, in 1976. And naturally, they weren't wearing their red and white striped shirts that day... the impossible glamour of the no-hoper is hard to overlook.

You'd think that it was hard to make a porridge of a striped shirt. All one need do, after all, is have vertical bands of colour of identical width, equidistantly spaced. It's not rocket science. But the sheer level of crimes - CRIMES - against striped shirts that have been done in the name of kit design are very hard to forgive or forget. I've picked out the five I consider to be the most shameful examples.

Southampton (1993-95)

This jersey was quite dazzlingly horrible. Stripes of all kinds of shapes and designs, combined with a totally unexpected chevron. The manufacturer - Pony - could not have been more aptly-named. It's one and only saving grace is the fact it doesn't commit the cardinal striped shirt sin, i.e. uneven spacing and width. The worst thing about it, however, was the fact it was the kit worn by the great Matthew Le Tissier as he scored some of the finest goals in the history of English football, thus securing this aesthete's nightmare of a kit's continued presence in compilation programmes and highlights packages from here to eternity.

Colchester United (1997-99)

There are several common sins committed against striped shirt design: uneven width, uneven spacing and straightness failures being the most likely to set my eyelid twitching. Sometimes, however, a shirt comes along which transcends even these mistakes, entering into the realms of metaphysical badness. Step forward Colchester United at the end of the last century. What Patrick were thinking when this appeared on their drawing board is very much open to interpretation, but it's unlikely that the answer was "about striped shirts". It looks like the report on a hard disc defragmentation.

Lincoln City (2011/12)

Nike are particular sinners in the striped shirt world in recent years. They, for reasons I hope they will keep to themselves, seem to have taken on the quite demonstrably unneccessary mission of redesigning the striped shirt. This is their current attempt, and it is quite magnificently awful. Awful enough that you could almost start to admire the brass neckery of it all. Almost, but not quite. This shirt remains in their template catalogue for the current season (why?) and some teams - Bradford City's away shirt among them - have even taken them up on the offer (for the love of god why?). The ever diminishing width of the stripes here are presumably a reflection of my will to live.

Newcastle United (1990-93)

Newcastle United are a fine old club with magnificent fans who almost invariably deserve better. But you don't always get what you deserve unfortunately, and the Magpies have been particularly badly served by the kit manufacturers down the years. Last season's bewildering two-stripes-folornly-floating-past-on-a-black-background effort takes some beating. But beat it this monstrosity did and does. The most eloquent argument ever made for clubs changing their kit design every season, the Toon wore this crazed experiment in multi-spacing and sizing for three seasons. It's completely all over the place. Luckily, the transgressors in this case - Umbro - are now very much at the forefront of modern, elegant and restrained football kit design.

West Bromwich Albion (1992-94)

What's worse than variable width stripes spaced at seemingly random intervals? Easy: just make it look like your television has cross-channel interference. Who knows how many sets were lost to a good stiff whack on the side by viewers thinking the tracking was off? Either way, this wibbly-wobbly catastrophe may very well have been designed by a genuine maniac. Wolves season ticket sales must have absolutely soared.

Our thanks again to Ed Carter for this superb review of some of the worst stripey monstrosities. Ed also makes the point that very few national teams wear striped shirts (Argentina and Paraguay being in the obvious minority). Which countries do you think could pull off the striped shirt look? Leave us a comment and let us know!

English Football Grounds VHS - Part 1

I have a confession to make... I have an obsession with stadiums. I blame it all on the San Siro and Italia 90. It’s my issue and I’ve come to peace with it. It does, however, mean I have several rather nerdy items in my football collection. The truly awesome Football Grounds of Europe by Simon Inglis, several volumes of Football Grounds from the Air... and this video...

The film opens with a shot of an empty Molineux stand and through the magic of cross fading, the ground slowly fills up, noise level rising as it does. Finally, the players run out on to the pitch to a cacophony of cheers. This then fades to black and some truly awful late 70s synth soundtrack kicks in... welcome to the world of low budget videos people!

The titles then inform us that the video is introduced by the legend that is Alan Mullery.

Never mind the quality, feel the...er...Mullery?

And then he appears. Eloquent, fluid, erudite, mellifluous... these are all words that describe the polar opposite of Mr. Mullery’s presenting style...and I use the word ‘presenting’ in its loosest possible sense. The best way I can describe Alan’s segues is you get the creeping sense that he’s been taken hostage by a terrorist group and with gun to head, is being forced to read out his plea to the Prime Minister, only for someone to have replaced the carefully prepared script at the last minute with some stuff about football league grounds... His eyes darting left to right as he struggles to muster any real enthusiasm for the words he’s supposedly written, there are clear signs of torture... though it’s us who is suffering, toes curling to extremes.

“In the next 70 minutes (oh lord!) or so, we aim to show you the huge changes that have taken place in the last few years...”

Just read that quote again then remember this was filmed in 1994. Now think of the state of most grounds in 2012 and you get the feeling Alan’s brain would have melted...though based on this video, I think it was almost there.

Thankfully, we soon get to the meat of the video and, with the hint dropped that we’re off to the ‘far north’, what feast of the senses are we treated to? Which huge ground do we get sight of to cease our pavlovian salivating?

This...

OK...

“So where are we off to first Dave?” enquires a disembodied female voice.
“Izzup to the norfeast to sint jamezzzzez park”, comes the answer.
Despite the shaky production values and obviously limited budget, it’s at this point that the video really does come into its own.  This is the first glimpse you get of St James’ Park...

I can see it!!!

This is less than 20 years ago, but the place is hardly recognisable.

The quirkiness then continues where the team decide to include the scene where they announce that “the first thing they should do is go to reception and get permission to go into the ground”. There’s detail and there’s DETAIL!

Once ensconced within, the changes that have taken place “in the last few years” are detailed. This was at a time when St James’ Park was halfway through its first major rebuilding phase, with the 2 ends being transformed from terracing to steep banked seating with their deep covered roofs. At this stage, only one of those ends had been completed; the other was still a low, open terrace and there’s still terracing in the main stand. The commentary makes the point that ‘fans familiar with the ground just a few years ago, wouldn’t recognise it today’ and, following a camera sweep around it, it’s hard to see anyone from the present recognising that particular incarnation of the ground.  Also of note, there’s not a single Sports Direct logo anywhere, though there is a Northern rock hoarding.

It’s also interesting to note that Keegan was so popular at the time, he even drew a crowd waiting for a bus...

Gimme Shelter...

We then move onto Middlesbrough, accompanied by some cod Wurlitzer style tunes...lovely! So...what did the Riverside look like in 1994? This...

Not actual size

Of course,  it wasn’t yet built for the ‘Boro still played at Ayresome Park in 1994. With no hint of irony given how soon they were to abandon the place, the narrator tells us that this is a place steeped in history. Hmmm...

History smells funny...

Without warning, Alan pops up again to deliver a stunning anecdote about playing Brian Clough for the first time...and by stunning, I mean deathly. I have a suspicion that Steve Coogan has this video in his collection somewhere. Needles to say, he had the last laugh.

So where are we off to next on this odyssey from Newcastle to Wembley?  Why, York City of course!

After the now obligatory ground pan, we’re treated to some footage of York against Colchester from the 1992/3 season for no apparent reason, other than maybe to show what a game looks like if you film it from behind a support column.

Mmmm... Posty...

One exciting anecdote from Alan later and we’re off to yet another ground that no longer exists... a beautifully snow covered Leeds Road in Huddersfield. While progress is a natural thing in life and most of these grounds were archaic even in the 90s, it is rather saddening to see so much that is now housing developments and supermarkets. Yes the grounds that replaced these decrepit old homes have better seating, views and facilities, but they also look so damn similar! The true joy of this video is the sheer variety of stands and terraces you get, often all within one ground. These places told a story. You could often see the history of a club just by looking from left to right.

At least what was to be known initially as the McAlpine Stadium was a rather unique looking thing in itself and can be seen here mid-construction.

At this point it was known as the McAlp

Here’s Alan again... Shankly, Dennis Law, 6 goals, Frank Worthington, Trevor Cherry all get a mention and I’ll cut him some slack here... he’s clearly speaking from memory rather than a cue card and a genuine sparkle is detectable as he tells us how none of them ever got a result there.

It’s Ewood Park now and here we have yet another ground in the middle of being built. This was of course the time when Jack Walker’s millions were transforming the club and the ground itself. Fast forward 18 years and how things have sadly changed...

Then to Anfield - or not as they clearly weren't allowed in, so instead some footage of them destroying Crystal Palace and some exterior shots of the famous Kop... where it can be seen that in 1994, you could get into a Liverpool game for £8... to repeat, that’s EIGHT POUNDS!

8 Quid???

A shot of the Hillsborough memorial then serves as what feels like a somewhat tasteless link to move on to Sheffield Wednesday’s ground. For a second...then it’s on to the red half of Manchester.

“A vast amphitheatre...now complete”. Complete in the sense of the old terracing having just been converted into seating and the roof line joined up, taking the capacity to a then mammoth 40,000. Only 2 years later, the huge, 3 tier stand took shape and kicked off the next phase of Old Trafford’s redevelopment.

Next up, Sheffield United and Dave “Harry” Bassett, the then manager, gives us quite an accurate description of the state of football ground development at the time, pointing out that since the Taylor report, a lot of grounds higher up the league have improved immensely, while those further down are stuck in less than desirable surroundings. The most interesting thing about his piece to camera, though, is that he doesn’t appear to take a breath all the way through. Honestly, he never once stops talking. A quick pan round the ground, which I have to say, looks like a shed, and up pops Dave again, detailing all the forthcoming changes to Brammal Lane... and again, no pausing. Either he’s nervous or he’s just imbibed a handful of speed.

Breathe Dammit!!!!

It's then off to Chester City's brand new Deva Stadium... and at this point (not even half an hour into the video), I'll pull into the motorway services for a 'comfort break' and see you all again in part 2...