Feast of football

Jeremy Clarke

I'm round at Dave's apartment watching the tapes of Channel 4's documentary Football's Fight Club. There's Dave, me and the maid sat on the sofa in front of Dave's wide-screen TV. Dave's wife has gone to the West End, and Dave has arranged for an articulated lorry to be outside Harvey Nichols at 5 o'clock to pick up the shopping.

Purporting to be a history of soccer hooliganism in Britain, the documentary is a solid hour of football crowd violence footage, interspersed with adverts for fast cars and gourmet food. For people like Dave and me, who went to football matches as impressionable lads during the late Sixties, early Seventies, when soccer violence was in it's hey-day, the documentary is an absolute feast. Dave says the continuous violence feels a bit like watching pornography. We are actually there on the fringes of two of the riots shown in the programme. Dave stops the tape several times but we can't see ourselves.

Dave's maid says she is pleased to see that so many of the hooligans were black. The day Mrs Thatcher decided to stamp out football hooliganism by gentrifying the game was a bad day for race relations in this country, she says. I look at her. She is quire serious.

We're enjoying every second of Millwall supporters rioting at Luton, when Dave's land line rings. The maid refuses to get up and answer it on the grounds that it probably isn't for her, so Dave stops the tape and gets up. It's Dave's old man, ringing from Benidorm. Dave's old man is 75 years old and is what is known as a bit of a character. Dave flicks a switch on his ansaphone so we can all hear what he's got to say. The line is wonderfully clear. 'Hello? Son? Listen.' he says. 'I've still got it in me. I've just pulled this 26-year-old bird. We've been in bed all day and she says she's had worse.' Dave's old man then describes what they've been doing to each other. The maid does a little I'm going to be sick' pantomime. Dave says, 'Look, I've told you before, Dad. I don't want to know. Go away. I'm busy.'

'Hold on, son,' says his old man. 'She wants to speak to you. I'll put her on. Here she is. She's called Janice. She's top drawer. Honestly. Here you go, babe,' he says.

'Hello?' says a young, slightly tipsy, Estuarine accent. Is that you, Dave?'

'What do you want?' says Dave tersely. 'Dave, I love you.'

'How can you? You've never even seen me!' says Dave. (He shoots me and the maid a look that says, 'The silly old fool doesn't half pick 'em.') 'I have seen you!' she says. 'I've seen the photo beside Sidney's bed. Dave, you're gorgeous!'

'But that was taken years ago, when I had hair.' says Dave. It's all fallen out since then. I'm bald.'

'Don't worry babe! I still love you, hair or no hair! See ya.' She's a cheerful soul by the sound of it.

Then Dave's old man comes on again. I'm jealous!' he says. 'Don't get any bright ideas, son. I saw her first.'

'Leave me alone, you momser,' says Dave. I'm busy.' Dave puts the phone down and switches the tape back on.

We are up to 1985: Bradford City, then Heysel. At the latter stadium, Liverpool supporters charge the Juventus fans, a wall collapses and 38 Italians are crushed to death amid harrowing scenes. The maid bursts into tears. A Liverpool hooligan who was there that day is interviewed. 'They started it! They started it!' we shout in our best Scouse accents. And, sure enough, that's exactly what he says. 'They started it.' he says. 'It was their fault for running away.' We see corpses being laid out on the terracing. The maid has her hand over her mouth. Her eyes are shiny with tears.

Then the phone rings again. Dave freezes the frame and gets up to answer it. It's his brother Paul calling from New York. He's hopping mad. `Dad's in bed with a brass in Benidorm and he's only rung me up in New York to give me all the gory details,' he says. 'And then the klutz puts her on the phone to say hello!'

'She isn't a brass.' says Dave. 'He met her somewhere.'

'She's a brass,' says Paul. 'I told her to tell him I'm busy then I slammed the phone down. I'm fuming, Dave. He gets my secretary to call me out of an important meeting just to tell me he's knocked a brass off. I'm not having it.'

'I tell you what. though, Paul.' says Dave. 'He's had a better day than you have by the sound of it.'