Football and Comedy: The Goodies (1982)

Football and comedy: two worlds that only usually collide whenever someone employs Joe Kinnear, yet hidden away in the depths of our psyche are images and memories we've harvested from decades spent watching the television.

Though we may have forgotten by now, the world of football has featured in many of our favourite comedy TV programmes. Sometimes a mere passing reference (no pun intended) is all we've needed while at other times nothing less than a full blown tribute to the beautiful game was provided for our viewing pleasure.

And that's why The Football Attic feels it necessary to begin this new series where we highlight these funny football memories from the past, no matter how slight or unfunny they may be. To start off, we bring you a bumper post highlighting an entire episode of The Goodies which is jam-packed full of football references from start to finish.

You can watch the video below, and if you'd like your experience enhanced further still, we've provided a few things to look out for in the listing further down this page. (Oh, and a warning: Some of the language used during this episode is a little... how shall we say... 'of its era'?)



00:00
The opening titles beckon the start of series 9, episode 3 of The Goodies. This series was the only one to be shown on ITV (London Weekend Television specifically) and our featured episode was originally broadcast on 16 January 1982.

During its 12-year run on British TV, The Goodies had several different variations on their theme tune, and if I'm honest this is probably my favourite. Not that you needed to know that or anything.

00:49
Our first sight of football and, if we're not mistaken, it's some grainy stock footage of the 1976 FA Cup Final between Southampton and Manchester United.

01:20
A nice use of some replica Admiral Southampton away kits on the actors there. Of course there's no disguising the fact that this spliced into the original stock footage, but hey ho...

02:17
Our first sight of The Goodies' flat, and there's Tim Brooke-Taylor showing support for his favourite club in real life, Derby County. Then we catch sight of the opening titles to The Big Match, such as they were at the time, but connoisseurs will note that the music doesn't match up to the graphics. The reason for that, we suppose, is that this footage is taken from a 1986 VHS release featuring this episode and one other from series 9. Presumably Jeff Wayne wouldn't allow his excellent theme tune to be used at the time, but at least we can confirm the issue was put right on subsequent DVD releases of this episode.

02:29
Yes, it's the warmest of welcomes to Fred Dinenage, occasional understudy for Dickie Davies on World of Sport and here a more than capable stand-in for Brian Moore. To his credit, Dinenage plays it absolutely straight, telling it like it is - or at least how it was back in the early 1980's. References to Manchester United's entire supporters club being arrested and Chelsea 'hitting six, punching twelve and strangling four' were funny yet satirically reflected the poor state of football in Britain at the time, as the episode goes on to explain...

03:35
Fans of The Goodies will know that their favourite show has a rich tradition of sending up TV commercials that stretches way back to the early 1970's. This time the target was a commercial for Barbican alcohol-free beer, one of several fronted by former Southampton manager Lawrie McMenemy (and here's another). Graeme Garden does an excellent impersonation of Gateshead-born McMenemy, finishing off with a wonderful punchline and comedy pass-out that was so good it made its way into the show's opening titles.

04:59

Who better to report on the growing violent tendencies among football's elite supporters than mild-mannered Kenneth Wolstenholme. Here he is talking to 'Twerp of the Month' Bill Oddie who brilliantly adopts the phraseology of the modern footballer to great effect ("I dunno, I just seem to be getting them right at the moment, Ken...")

06:27
A lovely bit of interplay between Tim Brooke-Taylor and himself on the TV screen where his alter ego appears as a Chief of Police, intent on ridding football of its hooliganism...

07:37
...and to that end Tim removes his football supporter's gear to reveal his Chief of Police uniform. Frustratingly for Brooke-Taylor, his outer garb is taking a long time to remove, so Tim ad libs his way through the sequence with the occasional "Hang on" and "Wait for it" to keep the audience amused.

08:13
A nice reference to the football kit designs of the early 80's. "Look at those shirts" says Tim. "In the old days they didn't have silk shirts. No, they had rough hessian shirts - with collars. Yes, I said collars, but they don't have collars nowadays, oh no. They have plunging necklines..." I'm not sure collars actually had died out by that stage, but the observations made in the dialogue are nonetheless delightfully written.

09:12

Once again we see some location footage taken at a football ground somewhere... but exactly where is it? The answer: Selhurst Park, home of Crystal Palace. There are the terraces upon which Bill stands in his thug persona, and onto the pitch run our traditionally dressed players. Tim Brooke-Taylor provides the commentary, perfectly mimicking the newsreel films of the wartime era.

11:52
Part Two of the show begins with Graeme Garden in traditional 'mad scientist' mode using Subbuteo to test the effects of watching football on some unsuspecting mice in the stands. A great setup you've got there, Graham - not sure about that playing technique though...

16:38

Having converted to the supposedly safe pastime of watching ballet, we're treated to new opening titles for The Big Match complete with David Ordini's theme tune, 'La Soiree', and updated logo. Graeme Garden this time impersonates Brian Moore ('- or Less')

17:10
Over at Covent Garden, the match is about to begin between Aston Villa (featuring Wayne Sleep) and Cricklewood, the latter featuring Garden, Oddie and three men bearing a striking resemblance to Kevin Keegan, Pele and Johann Cruyff.

19:06

A Big Match-style caption provides us with the half-time score, then it's Graeme Garden x 3 thanks to some split-screen jiggery-pokery. Having already given us his Moore-than-capable depiction of the Big Match presenter, we then see him impersonating pundits Brian Clough and Tommy Docherty with some aplomb.

20:41
A small detail it might be, but why is the old guy in the ballet crowd wearing an Ipswich Town rosette?

20:48
Listen out for some fruity narration from Garden: "Are we going to see Sleep's famous banana as he tries to bend it round the wall?"

21:24
A lovely little sequence here as Garden plays the dying swan, and a dying swan with a floppy arm and an itch, at that...

22:32
The game ends as a draw, so penalties are required. But what's this? The players themselves are being thrown into the net starting with Pele, but not before some more fruity narration from Garden who tells us that the Brazilian legend "usually goes to the left."

Unfortunately for Cricklewood, Pele's body crosses the line but his head doesn't, so it's no goal. (A case for goal-line technology if ever we saw one...?)

Wayne Sleep in goal deals capably with Cruyff but he's unable to stop Bill Oddie who fully crosses the line and claims a moral victory for Cricklewood.

Funny game, ballet...

Neil Cotton: Five shirts from my past

In the latest in a long line of excellent guest posts from writers far and wide, The Football Attic welcomes Neil Cotton from the blogsite Row Z. Neil's unearthed some long-forgotten football shirts from his wardrobe and here tells us how he came to own them and the memories they bring back...

The writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin once said that “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories” and chaotic certainly seems a good word for the football shirt collection which I recently uncovered nestling in an unassuming, perfectly square cardboard box which had in turn spent the best part of a decade residing forgotten at the bottom of a wardrobe. This seemed to be a collection without a theme or any other sense of order, but as I unwrapped each shirt memories came rushing back as if each were a tiny time-capsule.

England (home, 1995-96)

The story of Euro 96 is a familiar and much told one; the time when football did not so much come home as come in from the cold wilderness years of the preceding decades. In the summer of ’96 it seemed football was truly everywhere and the success of the tournament played in the bright new stadiums that came with the Premier League era spoke of renewal and optimism. Labour would sweep to power less than a year later on the back of D:ream’s anthemic song ‘Things Can Only Get Better.’ Euro 96 also coincided with a transitional period in my own life. I had at long last finished school and was looking forward to the future beyond, but in the meantime my summer consisted of watching the games on TV, spending long evenings in the local park using the cricket blinds as oversized goals and curling in free kicks from a distance until the light finally gave out and it was time to return home and catch Jennifer Aniston in Friends on Channel 4.

Saint-Etienne (home, 1994-96)

Is it OK to develop an allegiance, however fleeting, for a football team on the basis that one of your favourite bands is named after them? I’m not sure either, but this is how the St. Etienne shirt came to be in the collection. St. Etienne (the football team) were once the dominant force in French football but whilst Saint Etienne (the band) reached number 11 in the UK chart in 1995 with the single ‘He’s On The Phone’, St. Etienne (the football team) were but a shadow of their former selves. They finished in 18th place and third from bottom in Ligue 1 at the end of the 1994/95 season, but they were spared relegation when Ligue 2 champions Marseille were denied promotion. The reprieve, however, would only be for one season and they were finally relegated to Ligue 2 the following season when they finished in 19th place. The shirt, perhaps fittingly for a club with its best days behind it, looks to the past with its lace-up collar – fashionable at the time, but strangely something you don’t see much anymore.

Southampton (home, 1995-97)

As a Southampton supporter, the mid-1990s was a miserable time, not for the growing realisation that in the new economy of football my club would never amount to anything but relegation fodder, but for the shirts designed by unfashionable kit manufacturer Pony. The lesson from this shirt is that retro and polyester don’t mix - though Umbro would later show how it could be tastefully done with the clubs 125th anniversary, but as a season ticket holder I was required to own this shirt and wear it week in and week out, pulling on the polyester monstrosity each Saturday morning with the same weary resignation as a teenager getting ready for their Saturday shift in Woolworths.

Millwall (away, 1995-96)

A dull day being dragged around Lakeside was made worthwhile by coming across this in a chain sports shop. In an age of the kind of identikit shopping experience ushered in by mega-malls like Lakeside, the only ever nods to localism were the one or maybe two shirts belonging to lower league clubs hanging alongside the usual suspects; the Liverpool, Man U and Arsenal shirts which you could pick up from Exeter to Edinburgh. For part of the 1995/96 season it seemed Millwall might join these big-boys in the Premiership, but for a spectacular implosion following manager Mick McCarthy’s departure mid-way through the season. At one point Millwall had been top of the league but slid towards eventual relegation on the final day of what turned out to be a poor season. Nice away kit though.

Feyenoord (home, 1994-1996)

It’s strange to think how much has changed in a decade or so. Just take this Feyenoord shirt; now thanks to internet shopping and sites like eBay you could probably find one for sale and place an order in less than 10 minutes without so much as moving from your sofa, but in the days just before the internet really took off this shirt was an exotic rarity which had to be tracked down and snared. I obtained it from Soccerscene on Carnaby Street - an Aladdins Cave of football shirts from around the world - which I discovered thanks an interview with The Beautiful South’s Paul Heaton, himself an avid shirt collector, in a magazine whose name I have long forgotten. Like many of the shirts at the time it features a collar, something I think all football shirts should have – I mean would Cantona have had quite the same presence had he been wearing Man Utd’s current sans collar shirt?

Our thanks go to Neil for giving us his football reminiscences. If you've got some football memorabilia tucked away in a cupboard somewhere that you want to tell us about, drop us a line to admin [at] thefootballattic [dot] com and we could end up publishing them on The Football Attic!

Rebadge the badge

You might be surprised to hear this from us, but the world of football nostalgia isn’t as perfect as it might seem. Oh sure, we’ve allowed entire months to pass us by while thumbing through our pile of old Panini albums, but that’s not to say everything in this Elysian netherworld is as cracked up as it ought to be.

Take football badges, for instance. At first sight, nothing could be finer than a vast array of club insignias displayed in collective formality, each using colours and motifs to represent a team you probably don’t support and could care much less for. Yet each one has been crafted and honed by skilled artists and designers to symbolise the hopes, ambitions and dreams of an ever-changing army of players and fans alike.

At least that’s what you’d think. Unfortunately some club badges, historic and long-standing though they might be, are far from perfect and... well there’s no easy way to say this... are in need of an update.

Normally such talk of modernisation is an afront to our very nature, but here at The Football Attic we believe perfection is achievable if you wish hard enough for it. So let’s see if we can identify those club badges that are long overdue a refresh and work out how to make them better.

Southampton

On the plus side, there aren’t many English football club badges that have a football scarf on them. Come to think of it, there aren’t many that have a halo on them either, but the inclusion of both here somehow add too much quirkyness and informality to the Saints motif. At least there’s some sort of Southampton coat of arms on display, but even then it’s possible to argue that it’s not the most evocative example of local heraldry.

So what can we replace it with?  Well perhaps a saint of some sort... the patron saint of sailors, given that Southampton is one of England’s major sea ports. A picture of St. Brendan, then, framed in a circular ribbon featuring the words ‘Southampton Football Club’ with small anchor motifs dotted in the sky behind our newly-chosen saint. What more could you ask for - it’s got history, reverence, local history and not a single scarf in sight.

Birmingham City

You’ve got to hand it to the St Andrews club - they had international ambitions, but they came to nought. Their current badge, implemented in 1976, features a ribbon and a globe atop an old-fashioned football the like of which one associates with Bobby Charlton and 6-3 defeats to the Hungarians. Original, distinctive, but starting to look a bit tired now. Let’s see what we can change it for...

How about a football featuring a stylised swirly-whirly pattern in blue designed to look vaguely like Spaghetti Junction, the famous motorway interchange resident in England’s second city since the mid-1960’s? Below it in a suitably serifed font could be the name of the club and either side of the ball could be ‘18’ and ‘75’ to show the year in which the club was formed. A modern logo-style badge, admittedly, but one that would see it through another decade or two before the inevitable next redesign.

Norwich City

English club badges featuring birds of one sort or another come ten-a-penny, but not many feature a sweet domestic caged bird constantly fearing its inevitable destiny in the jaws of the humble family cat. Yet that very creature, bright yellow upon a green shield and perched on a ball, has survived well since its inception as part of Norwich’s club badge in 1972. The canary. that is - not the cat.

The problem is, it’s a bit boring, frankly. Canaries by their very nature have little to offer beyond tweeting incessantly until someone tells them to shut up. (Any comparison with Stephen Fry, incidentally, is entirely inappropriate.) Far better, perhaps to have the magnificent spire of Norwich Cathedral on display within a similar shield, flanked on either side by lions (given that there’s one on the Norwich coat of arms). The finishing touch?  The name of the club written in full below it in a modern, bold, sans-serif font. Piece of cake.

Blackburn Rovers

Ah, that trusty old red rose. How very redolent of natural beauty, how very English, how very... badly drawn. Time to get rid of it, methinks. I mean how you can you have a team known far and wide for wearing white and blue halved shirts and not have that incorporated into the badge, for heaven’s sake?

Here’s how you do it. First, you take a circle, slightly stretched top to bottom to make it an oval of sorts. Across the bottom, you have some black wavy lines to depict the ‘burn’ bit of ‘Blackburn’ (it means ‘river’, you know). Above it, the oval is split in two vertically so that the left half is white, the other is blue. In the white half, you have a picture of a mill to reflect Blackburn’s heritage as a wool-weaving town, and on the other you have a sheep - the provide of the wool. As ever, the name can go below somewhere, preferably in a font such as Times New Roman. Heritage, colours and relative imagery, all present and correct.

So there you have it - my own masterclass in how to freshen up those tired old club badges. Nothing could be simpler, and if you wish to prove that by suggesting redesigns of other club badges, drop us a line to admin [at] thefootballattic [dot] com or leave us a comment on this post. We look forward to hearing from you.

Al Gordon's Top 5 Patrick Kits

Regular Football Attic contributor Al Gordon of God, Charlton & Punk Rock has come up with another cracking article on French kit manufacturers...this time it's Patrick in the spotlight...

Those purveyors of nostalgic footballing memories, Got Not Got, posted an article recently about another French kit manufacturer from the 1980’s, Patrick. With imported French kit design still at the forefront of my mind after my Le Coq Sportif piece, I thought I’d ‘treat’ you all to my five favourite Patrick kits.

I’ve avoided one common template used by the likes of Derby County, Birmingham, Wrexham, Rotherham and Newport County although with its use of fine pinstriping it’s very elegant in its own right. Instead I’ve chosen not just from that golden period, but from designs across the years.

1. Swansea City, 1981-84

It’s not hard to see where the inspiration for this kit came from, fellow French firm Le Coq were already making something similar for Spurs. A classic plain white affair, it shared both manufacturers motif positioning on the sleeve and a central club crest with their counterparts. The difference between the two designs came in the style of the collar. Patrick used a round neck with a slight overlap at the front, very much in a style Adidas used in the Eighties with the likes of Arsenal and QPR.

As wonderful as the shirt is, what really sets this kit apart from the competition is the two black stripes on the bottom right corner of the shorts, a feature Patrick used for many clubs. The two lines were very much a Patrick logo borrowed directly from the boots they were famous for during the period. It was very understated yet just enough to give the whole ensemble a touch of class.

I always remember this as Swansea’s heyday kit from the old Division One, worn by the likes of Bob Latchford and Alan Curtis. Ironically, modern day Swansea back in the top flight of English football once again can lay claim to being the best dressed team in the land with wonderfully  simple centenary designs both home and away supplied by Adidas.

Sandwiched between classically simple designs by other favourite sportswear firms of mine, Bukta, Hummel and Admiral, fans of The Swans really were spoilt for over a decade with some of the cleanest football kits on the market.

2. Southampton, 1980-85

Kevin Keegan. We all remember being surprised by news that the European Footballer of the Year was returning from West Germany to ply his trade on the south coast with Southampton.

The pictures of that pristine perm in a red and white Patrick shirt were beamed around the world ensuring a kit some Saints fans weren’t too keen on would become iconic. In contrast it’s the bald head of David Armstrong that I always recall wearing it.

Deviating from the traditional stripes seems to anger all fans whose sides play in a shirt of that configuration. Patrick went for an ‘Ajax negative’ idea with the bold white panel down the chest and red sides, separated by fine black pinstripes. They were always going to be facing the pressure trying to follow Admirals previous shirt worn through the end of the seventies. In fact Patrick failed to take on board any concerns of the fans as after five years they followed this design with a predominantly red shirt with white and black shoulders (a template which Birmingham City also adopted).

There are many different versions of this shirt as the design ran for far longer than sponsor’s contracts and both Rank Xerox and Draper Tools, the two names you associate the most with the club, can both lay a claim to this famous design.

3. Wimbledon, 2002-04

With striking yellow sides which continued down the shorts, a bold yellow V-neck and simple sock detailing, you’d think there is nothing particularly astonishing about this tasteful Wimbledon kit. Two things draw me to it though, first, it’s the last kit worn under the old Wimbledon name, and second just look at the sponsors logo!

AFC Wimbledon had already been formed at this point and Wimbledon the league club were planning the logistics of migrating north to Milton Keynes. This strip was worn in the last season at Selhurst Park and was retained for the first year (the clubs final season) at the hockey stadium.
With the GO-MK logo in black white and red, the colours of the rebranding, this really is in my opinion one of the saddest football kits ever worn.

The likes of Warren Barton and Dean Holdsworth were among the final Wimbledon squad to wear this shirt although they were sold by the clubs administrator before the name change. A young Dean Lewington, son of Fulham legend Ray, also wore it and still wears the white shirt of MK Dons today.

4. Stockport County, 1999-2001

Stockport County are a club that have never been afraid to boldly try something different. If a kits good enough for the world champions, then it’s good enough for them. Following Argentina’s success on home soil in 1978, County adopted the light blue and white stripes with black shorts for three seasons, right up to the outbreak of war in the Falklands. They finished the last couple of months of that campaign in a black and white number straight out of the Adidas (or perhaps Kay’s) catalogue.

County were market leaders in some of the horror stories from the early Nineties, before getting a little too carried away with shadow striping by 1995 on a predominantly white kit. Adidas brought a short interlude of sanity back to the club for three years before Patrick embarked on resuming normal service with this delight.

Taking its roots from the Southampton kit of fifteen years earlier, the winged collar and a bold white chest panel are delightful, yet Patrick weren’t content with the tried-and-tested formula and had to add symmetrical pinstriping, very reminiscent of my own ‘telephone doodling’.

5. Port Vale, 2001-03

Number five was a hard choice. Patrick produced a fine quartered shirt for Cambridge United but that missed out as it looked a little too much like a rugby design. There was also a white number made for Plymouth Argyle with fine green pinstripes that was definitely in the mix, but I’ve plumped for a bizarre design that I believe could be unique. If you know of other clubs with these unmistakeable sleeves then please send pictures!

What is in essence, a simple design with its neat v-neck collar and famous sponsor logo, Patrick went one step further than Hummel did with the chevrons and put a whole pedestrian crossing up the sleeve. The availability of a flashing orange light epaulette would have made those who like to accessorize very happy! This design also continued up the side of the shirts, my ‘telephone doodling’ here would probably consist of a famous pop group crossing Abbey Road.

My memories of the shirt are a little thin on the ground nearly a decade on, but judging by the picture, Patrick only made them in a very limited range of sizes! A very distinctive and dynamic design to end on.

Once again, our thanks go to Al for this great post. If you'd like to write an article for The Football Attic, contact us at admin [at] thefootballattic [dot] com or catch us on Twitter or Facebook.

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!