Go On My Son! (BBC 2, Wednesday)
Reputations (BBC 2, Monday)
Emerald Shoes (ITV, Sunday)
Rising Steps (RTE 1, Tuesday)
As Chelsea played Arsenal live on Sky Sports, BBC 2 turned its cameras on schoolboy football. Modern Times: Go On My Son! sought to score on its home ground of psycho-sociology. Three working-class fathers from south London - Cozzie, Darren and Derek - were selected to form a premier team of neurotic paternal ambition. They coaxed, badgered and cajoled their sons, all aged between eight and 11. Cozzie, from the aptly named Downham estate, manages his son's under-11 team. Cozzie's teams have a reputation for "going in hard". Little wonder when the `team talk' before a London Cup semi-final sounded like a reading from the later pages of The Lord of the Flies: "We destroy things, right? Destroy! Destroy!" roared Cozzie. Earlier we had heard how Cozzie's Destroyers had left one opponent with a broken leg and others with a variety of other sidelining injuries. "They don't teach the kids to play like this at West Ham," said a disapproving mother, rolling her eyes towards Upton Park. (Perhaps not, but even the Happy Hammers can have no excuse for Julian Dicks.)
Darren, from the Doddington estate, was, when we met him, coach for his son's team, the Wandle Wanderers of Wandsworth. Tony was the manager but Darren was "in charge of motivation". Darren's motivating rituals made the All Blacks' haka look like a particularly effete minuet. "Who are we?" he bellowed, with pop-eyed delirium. "Who are we?" Linked in a huddle, the under-10 Wanderers, recently promoted to an A league, squawked their reply: "We're Wandle, we're Wandle, we're Wandle . . . "
Derek was more sinister, less cartoonishly buffoonish than either Cozzie or Darren. He has two sons, Ojay (nine) and Troy (eight). He takes them training on Wandsworth Common at 6 a.m. Ojay has more ability than Troy with the result that their mother, Dawn, generally attends Troy's matches while Derek shouts non-stop at Ojay's. While he was refereeing one of Ojay's games, we saw Derek ring Dawn to get an update on Troy's match. Mobiles to their ears, they exchanged live match commentaries. Surely, there's some sort of FIFA regulation about referees engaging in this sort of thing.
And so it went - demented goal celebrations, theatrical despair when goals were conceded, foaming fury at debatable decisions. The intensity of Cozzie, Darren and Derek suggested that they were simply potbellied saddos trying to relive their youth by hijacking their sons' lives. They were male, council park versions of pushy Hollywood mothers and really were easy laughing stocks for a typically tittering BBC 2 audience. Exploitation TV comes in many forms.
But there was more to this field of play than the embarrassments provided by the football fathers. When they spoke about their childhood relationships with their own fathers, their places in contemporary male culture made some sense. Part traditional Neanderthal and part bonding New Men, they were also exhibits of the changes in current masculinity. They were, it is true, extreme exhibits, blundering dangerously, obsessively and manipulatively - especially in Derek's case - into their sons' lives.
Indeed, in their simultaneous evoking of horror and sympathy, the football fathers were genuine tragedians. The chances of any of their sons becoming the next David Beckham are practically nil. Unless Cozzie, Darren and Derek can discover perspective and proportion, it is clear that the game is going to end in tears for them and their sons. By the end, there were hopeful signs that defeat was civilising Cozzie and Darren. Ojay, however, had made it into a London youth academy (with Millwall associations!) and Derek was piling on the pressure.
Psychologically, the football fathers were obvious. More disturbing, however, was the class dimension to Go On My Son! Easily, and, in fairness, often rightly ridiculed, these extreme exhibits of neurotic workingclass paternal ambition were rather sad but less insidious than the middle-class "points parents" who pressurise and even destroy the lives of Leaving Cert students. Compared with the commando legions of paternal and maternal academic browbeaters, even Cozzie the Destroyer, Demented Darren and Dangerously Driving Derek are way down the league of prattish parents.
One son who did go on to score in the big time before facing, not just a red card, but a lifetime ban, was Richard Nixon. A drunken, pillpopping wife-beater, Tricky Dicky, if Reputations: The Secret Life of Richard Nixon was correct, was a prime example of neurotic filial ambition inflicted on the world, most specifically, of course, on south-east Asia. "My mother was a saint," he said during his resignation speech. Really, Dick? Talk about Rosemary's Baby syndrome.
When he was in his early 20s, Nixon was, if anything, even more fulsome about his ma. He described her then, not as a mere saint but as "a supreme ideal". Oedipus, how are ya? The fact that he did so in a severance speech to his first girlfriend, Ola Welch Jobe, showed the sublime sensitivity, tact and understanding which would underpin his political career. Anyway, with his mammy as "a supreme ideal", Nixon ventured forth.
It was generally agreed that he had "awesome self-discipline" and, early on, perhaps he had. He certainly had awesome ambition, which drove him even against his own nature. Characteristically shy and reclusive, he showed obsessive, Cozzie/Darren/Dereklike determination to make his school's football team before he entered the brash, unblushing, brass-neck world of politics. "He liked to put himself in stressful jobs and then couldn't take the pressure at its worst," said his shrink, Dr Hutschnecker.
When he couldn't take the pressure, he took the booze. Then he took sleeping pills and Dilatin, a drug normally used to treat epilepsy. His wife, Pat, frequently endured the aggression unleashed by this cocktail. Nixon thumped her face when he lost the election for the governorship of California and again when Watergate began to bite. No fear that he was going to treat the mother of his own children as a saint, far less a supreme ideal.
Increasingly sodden, stoned and paranoid, the great fear was than Nix would use nukes. He almost did, it appears, but the political and military cronies close to him effectively engineered an unseen coup d'etat and Damascus, for instance, like the rest of the world, still exists. This was just the first episode in a Reputations two-parter. On Monday, you can hear evidence that he conspired to sabotage the 1968 Vietnam peace process in order to get elected.
Revisionist biographical documentaries generally seek to overthrow, not compound, accepted reputations. From a strain which, in recent years, has brought us Enid Blyton playing nude tennis, Billy Butlin as an arch lecher and Douglas Bader as a lousy pilot, the revised Nixon is unique in further enforcing, not challenging, the public image. It showed, yet again, that in politics, those who most crave power are, by definition, the least suitable to be granted it. There is a point at which determination becomes dementia and it's more dangerous in world politics than on schoolboy football fields.
If the world of schoolboy football appears competitive, it is a relaxed love-in beside the world of Irish dancing. Why should we be surprised? The £1 million-a-week man Michael Flatley was making almost 20 times as much as the paltry £52,000-a-week paid to Roy Keane. Two documentaries this week - Emerald Shoes and Rising Steps - examined aspects of Irish dancing in its post-Riverdance legacy. Emerald Shoes, though already dated, attempted a comprehensive overview. Three epochs in the evolution of Irish dancing were identified: the 19th century dancing masters, the Celtic Revival at the turn of the 20th century and the Broadwayisation instigated by Michael Flatley. Pauline McLynn narrated, a host of talking heads commented on the path worn by the dancing feet and archive footage recalled dancing at crossroads. The programme, like Riverdance itself, had verve and energy. More crucially, it also had voices which eschewed the tiresome, self-congratulatory guff about the showbiz phenomenon.
The received notion now is that Riverdance made Irish dancing sexy. Certainly, it made it sexier than it was when priests with sticks marshalled the dance floors to the tune of the Catholic Tiger. But thinning turnips could be made sexy beside the ceilis of de Valera's Ireland. It's not as if the new, megabucks version was some sort of Celtic upping-the-ante on a Roman orgy.
Inspired, if that is the best word, by Irish-America, it was The Rockettes meeting jigs, hornpipes and reels. Attractive women in short skirts kicking their legs in the air was hardly a revolution in music-hall entertainment. Sure, there was great skill and much sweat and discipline required to produce these shows. And shows they were, expertly performed, lit and choreographed. But BP Fallon, a canny old cat, was correct to point out that they were not "authentic" expressions of Irish culture. They are, he said, part of the "continuing leprechaunisation" of Ireland. They are.
With economic globalisation, forms of cultural globalisation inevitably follow and the big, theatrical Irish dance boom is a prime example. Anyway, Emerald Shoes, though its focus was primarily historical and its method primarily upbeat, sensibly included common sense. Well, it did, at least until the end. "Only one thing is certain - the dance will go on," it concluded. Yes, Irish dancing will continue but, like the Murdochisation of professional football, there's a sense of squeezing a lemon dry about the "sexified" era.
Meanwhile, Rising Steps focused on 10-year-old New Yorker, Theresa Abadessa, a championship-winning youngster with hopes as big as and prospects bigger than Ojay, Troy and the other football kids. We saw Theresa preparing, or more accurately, being prepared, for an Irish dancing competition in the Big Apple. Remember that she's aged 10. She was brought to a professional make-up consultant. Powdered, eye-shadowed and blushered, she was then clothed in an elaborately tailored dancing dress with designs which looked like The Book of Kells flirts with Jackson Pollock.
Then she was given her wig. All the female competitors wore curly colleen wigs. With the make-up, the dress and the wig, we were travelling into that American territory where prepubescent girls are rigged out like beauty queens. Mind you, Theresa has talent and her teachers are hopeful of future world-championship success. In a week which raised questions about the pitfalls of parental and filial ambition, you'd have to wonder about the cost of winning. Still preferable to the cost of losing, I suppose, even if is it our failures which civilise us.