Television
All together, lads . . .
Martin Cropper
At the end of the day', said the young man in the suit, 'we've just got to go out there and play our game.' Eight hours later, now in a blue football strip, he said, 'I couldn't have done it without the lads.' Except that it wasn't the same young man at all. The first was a real footballer from Oldham (Bovis) Athletic interviewed be- fore The Match (ITV, 2.30 p.m.) against Nottingham (Shipstones) Forest; the second was a creature of fiction expressing his philosophy of life in The Manageress (Channel 4, 9 p.m.). There was further confusion in that the fake team were first seen recording to camera the following plug: 'Get a taste of exciting second division football. Watch us on Sunday in The Match.' Their lacklustre delivery drove the director to ecstasies of frustra- tion, but we must assume that the real director was satisfied with Cherie Lunghi and the absence of exclamation marks in her line: 'Well done, lads. Great perform- ance.' She was referring, of course, to their football.
Non-fictional football managers deal in fancier lines these days, a result,no doubt of television's exclusion order on parrots, moons and ongoing situations. Coventry City's John Sillett, asked to comment at half-time on the embarrassing failure of Bovis v Shipstones to live up to its billing as a goal-glut bonanza, intoned: 'Beware the Ides of Clough!' Bald, jowly, large of nose and lip, Sillett is a pre-degreased version of Cohn Wal- lace, the sometime professional liar who has recently taken over most television channels in his campaign to get people to believe him. 'It's better to disinform peo- ple than to kill them' is a statement which will bring great comfort to defence corres- pondents everywhere. In the 1970s most of them had no defence against his canny planting of the story about the propensity of IRA molls to self-destruct as a result of the static electricity in their knickers. One such scribe told The Media Show (Channel 4, Sunday, 8 p.m.) that he still thought this a good story. In a way he's right. Lit for some reason like a Caravaggio, and catech- ised rather mousily by Emma Freud, Wal- lace might have been the mystery subject of a game show — What's My Lie? perhaps.
But there's no doubting the unswerving veracity of Kim II Sung, wise father of North Korea's millions, whom he advises and instructs on all matters from rice husbandry to how to build a better documentary. The Polish-made film The Parade (Channel 4, Monday, 10.40 p.m.) was unimprovably pokerfaced, using no- thing but upbeat footage and precise trans- lations of official pronouncements. Here is the rock where our great and beloved leader, Comrade General Kim Il Sung, first resolved to save his country from the imperialists. These bronze doors, weighing 16 tons, were a gift from the working people of Korea to their great and beloved leader (all together now). Tens of thousands of radiantly, almost painfully joyous citizens became human pixils form- ing gigantic computer images that illus- trated the glories of the Kim way. Match of the Day used to do this in its opening sequence but on a punier and decidedly less brilliant scale. Such immaculate unani- mity is a lesson to us all. The problems of Northern Ireland could be solved at a stroke if only its people spent their leisure hours rehearsing for choreographed de- monstrations in football stadia. Well done, lads. Great performance.
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