Monday 18 August 2014

The video library

A few years ago the VHS era ended seemingly overnight. Suddenly everyone was upgrading to DVD and sticking their video recorders in the attic/garage/shed, leaving a metric tonne of collective E180s and expensive sell-through videos to gather dust. With the subsequent rise of YouTube and their dropping of video time limits a little while back, though, there now seems a second digitised life source for such tapes. After all, who's going to call copyright on a dead media and probably a few dead production companies?

This, then, is as comprehensive a list as BMA could put together over a weekend of full-length, non-club-specific football videos that are now viewable streaming online in full. By all means let us know, either in the comments or via Twitter, of any others. Or, of course, cut out the middleman and upload your own. Brazil 70: Team of the Century, The Story Of The World Cup, Match Of The Day The Entertainers, Soccer Studs With Zoe Ball, we'll take anything on.

Race For The Championship 1988-89 (part two)
For each of the four years of ITV's contract they in association with the Football League and Chrysalis put out a series of end of season videos, one for each club plus Race For The Championship and Goals Galore. You don't see them very often on eBay and when they do turn up they can still go for something like RRP, but it's still surprising given the League tend to turn a blind eye to YouTube clips of that era that more of them aren't online. This is the first of those season reviews in good budget fashion camcorder to screen fashion, which by necessity loses its brio towards the end but, if as expected from that era of ITV not in great enough detail as to everything that happened, gives the title race a fair overview.

Do I Not Like That
After the success of The Impossible Job Channel 4 rushed out a VHS version with extra material, none of which adds much to the gaiety. You may as well just watch the original.

101 Great Goals
TEKKERS! This is sure to go viral! You have to watch these unbelievable golazos!

Gary Lineker's Striker
Lineker, already showing more composure in front of the autocue than most players, links a grab-bag of clips from contemporaries. Not much you'd call rare, though there's quite a bit of early 90s Serie A in there and a lengthy reminder that Peter Beardsley still goes underrated. 'With grateful thanks to' Jon Holmes, unsurprisingly.

Danny Baker's Own Goals And Gaffs
Danny Baker's Own Goals And Gaffs 2
Danny Baker's Right Hammerings
Danny Baker's Fabulous World Of Freak Football
Now we're talking. NOW WE'RE TALKING. The two videos that started the trend, the first 21 years old soon, still holding up today despite, in the case of volume one, the overlong unlucky deflections that make up the second half of the domestic own goals section and even after you notice most of the crowd reactions are the same post-dubbed over, presumably, commentary. The second one is the better. Freak Football extends the brief a little, partly due to having the best commentary - and it is Baker that makes these what they are, spotting specific reactions and knowing which jokes to avoid. In between the slight curio that was Right Hammerings, a collection of racking up the scoreline mostly worthwhile for Finn Harps' capitulation at Derby. Not in this selection: Whose Season Was It Anyway?, an overview of 1992-93 in which Danny is only required to pass tart comment between sections while a tyro Gabriel Clarke does the spadework; Best Of Baker, which I've never seen but apparently features no new material; and Glorious Return Of Own Goals And Gaffs, which is actually just made like every other blooper DVD in that Danny's input is reduced to little overlong sketches between montages. Perhaps he had a large bill that summer.

Gazza - The Real Me
They never talk about this Baker video, though, though important in a different way as this was where he and Paul Gascoigne intersected publicly for the first time. Rushed out for the end of 1990 with title music actually credited as 'Gazza's Anthem', the concept is Danny hanging around Gazza on the first day of pre-season training, nearly getting run over by Lineker in doing so, and taking him back to old haunts amid clips and testimonials from others, Glenn Roeder notably showing up as pretty much Paul's minder. Roger Tames turns up. Jimmy Five Bellies is seen but not heard. Gascoigne's tracksuit is about as 1990 a thing as can be envisaged. The big ending involves the Beano.

Nick Hancock's Football Nightmares
Nick Hancock's Football Hell
Nick Hancock Football Doctor
When Baker moved on VVL passed the baton on to the jovial Stokie for the very definition of diminishing returns. See the scripts - notably, written by up to five other people - move from entertaining and common football fan ground to lame topicality as They Think It's All Over takes up more of his time and the range of clips attempt to cover too much ground for the instant comedy hit such videos require. Also, if someone could explain what's supposed to be so funny about the Darlington clip about two and a half minutes into Football Nightmares it'd be appreciated. Also, breasts somehow qualify. This list won't cover the They Think It's All Over videos, by the way, as they're too depressing.

Motty Takes the Mike
High, Wide and Hansen
Saint & Greavsie: It's A Funny Old Game
Having said that, there's little so depressing as the cash-in clips/cock-up videos that followed in VVL's wake, and in using that word we're referring to the recirculating flow around a body that's just passed through water that drowns everything in the vicinity. This trifecta of will-this-do? are connected by writing credits for Norman Giller, the Zelig of snug golf club bar football comedy, who must be contractually obliged to do one a year or something given his credit also turns up on similar DVDs by Gordon Ramsay and Ray Winstone to name... well, the two he lists in his biography. Motty Takes The Mike begins with him dubbing over the Michael Owen Argentina goal (covered for telly by Jon Champion) and features him giving out 'Motty' awards - of course - in various categories. Best bit: Motson briefly dismissing "wham bam thank you goals". Then Alan Hansen sleepwalks through the usual clips and a few that seem to have been thrown in for the sake of it - if anyone can explain what's hilarious about an intricate Man Utd passing move that turns up in the first montage let me know - with the aid of Kevin Connolly impressions (including dubbing over "I don't remember David Coleman doing a lot of this" with something far less funny) adding actually less than nothing is almost a relief. For the record, this is the only tape here to include John Sitton. It is, however, the third to include that hilarious laugh-a-minute moment, Dave Beasant's Cup final penalty save. Reusing many of the same clips, Giller also turns up as executive producer for his mates, who literally murmur their reactions to the clips as if not realising they're being recorded - a script might have helped, especially as neither recognise the Jeff Astle offside Leeds goal until too late - with Jimmy telling too long anecdotes in between. The first pointless Saint laugh is 1:40 in. Still, nice selection of moments from the TV show towards the end, including Jimmy repeatedly hanging out with boxers to his continual detriment.

Footballers Behaving Badly
And now, the depths. Editing that seems to have been achieved by attaching the videotape to a wall and firing razors at it through an adapted nerf gun, with a caption apology that seeks to explain why Neil Morrissey is variously wearing Leeds and Barnet shirts throughout but doesn't suggest why the Crystal Palace fan chose to sport either, and with an overdubbed commentator who clearly had better things to do that day. It's eleven minutes before two clips are shown back to back without a Morrissey witticism in between. It's when a section on players having facial hair appears that you start to realise what's actually happened is the production team brought in a load of unrelated clips and challenged themselves to make something of it. And I wanted to see more of the Rob Bonnet report on banana inflatables. Wonder if the Colin Irwin credited as writer is the same one who wrote for Mojo and Melody Maker.

Big Ron Bites Back
This is very slightly different, in that it looks like he was commissioned to star in a blunder video but beyond a few half-arsed voiceovers couldn't commit to anything so facile, so it starts with a montage explaining who our host is before various close personal mates of Ron's - Venables, Bassett, Fry, a becapped Andy Gray, Jim Smith, Stan Boardman, a notably uncredited Mick Miller - swap largely unfunny ancedotes and laugh at their own punchlines. It starts with Atkinson opening a bottle of Moet et Chandon, which about sets the scene. The credits end with him eating a chocolate eclair in close-up. Who was this aimed at?

Alistair McGowan's Football Backchat
Yeah, maybe the long bit about how great Stuart Hall is hasn't aged well.

Fantasy Football League
Fantasy Football League 2 - The Glory Years
Fantasy Football was, I suppose, an adjunct to that kind of football-not-serious-is-sellable world, if coming at it from a different angle. Almost all the series is on YouTube anyway but all of the spin-offs feature new material. The first one has a remarkable through-line of a story in which an astronaut with Kevin Eldon's voice suggests a number of Phoenix From The Flames be taken on a moonshot and includes a deviation in which Frank and David sing about Statto to the tune of Dean Friedman's Lucky Stars. Number two features a load of other bits everyone remembers - the Nike anti-racism advert spoof, David Pleat recreating his run across the pitch, soul singing lothario Ray Stubbs, Saint And Greavsie Talk About The Endsleigh League As If It's Important, Best Of Friends - The Official Story Of Gary Lineker And Willie Thorne. And then... oh, wait a moment.

Best Of Friends - The Official Story Of Gary Lineker And Willie Thorne
Anyway...

Fantasy Football League 3 - Three Men And A Football
Unseen Fantasy Football
More Unseen Fantasy Football
Volume 3 is where we get the Jason Lee material, where people seemed more bothered about the hair observation (which was already subject to chants anyway) than that it involved Baddiel blacking up, plus a weird bit they did once where it was envisaged that Lennie Bennett looks like Gary McAllister, which he doesn't. Still, Pele Was Shite, the football condom and a bit where they write a joke about Gordon Strachan always having the same haircut only for him to have his hair cut, can't argue with that. We spot a credit at the end for Inbetweeners creator Iain Morris as researcher. By the fact it's not all clips Unseen is the most fascinating, featuring clips from the pilot (Frank sings! Nigel Clarke of the Mail done up like the Invisible Man!), Nick Hancock attempting to get the sentence "David Mellor is a cunt" onto television, a possibly drunk Jimmy Hill, and Neil Morrissey magnificently slagging off... Footballers Behaving Badly. More Unseen is broadly out-takes from Phoenix From The Flames, and one ex-player not getting on the end of a Baddiel cross or corpsing at an ad-lib is much like another, but it does end with Frank and David's appearance on the last Match Of The Day of 1993-94 and an awkward Three Lions PA at German TV's end of season awards show.