The Union Game (BBC 2, Sunday)
Eureka Street (RTE 1, Thursday)
The Troubled Dean (RTE 1, Sunday)
Seeking Pleasure (BBC 2, Tuesday)
So, William Webb Ellis didn't just pick up the ball and invent rugby. Well, well, who's surprised? The yarn always had the suspicious neatness of an origin myth concocted to prop up a proprietorial claim. In fact, the Ellis codology is an example of 1890s PR, dreamt up and disseminated by a network of past pupils (or "old boys" in public school-speak) of Rugby school.
Fearful that men they saw as their social inferiors were not only becoming their playing superiors, but were gaining influence over the sport, the old boys collapsed the scrum and ran away with a ball they believed to be theirs by right. It's a common story in sport: the kid who owns the ball takes it home if he's not winning or can't get his way. The Union Game didn't kick to touch on the awkward class issues which have always permeated rugby union. If, at times, it oversimplified the story to a "middle-class bad; working-class good" starkness, it nonetheless correctly opted to view the sport as a by-product of British social history.
Mind you, considering that this new series was made by BBC Wales, the relative classlessness of Welsh rugby was always going to feature more than its periodic ruthlessness. But the argument that rugby union in England, Ireland and Scotland has been "more representative of a class than of nations" seems undeniably true. It's not as though rugby is unique in this regard - dole-drawing polo and croquet players are, after all, as thin on the ground as baronial pitch-and-toss schools - but rugby is, and has been for decades, a mass spectator sport.
The Rugby school connection, the series argued, began in earnest when Thomas Arnold (Matt's dad) became headmaster there in 1828. Tom changed the English public school education system, replacing aristocratic decadence with "a kind of muscular Christianity" designed to turn boys into men, or, more specifically, officers of the empire. The version of "character-building" football played at Rugby school - like all the other public school versions, it was adapted from peasant folk-football - grew in popularity, helped greatly by Arnold's influence.
Having had their characters built at school, old boys brought their game to the comfortable suburbs and rugby became the middle-class sport. But then the sons of north of England mill and mine and factory owners began receiving the same kind of muscular Christian educations and they, too, brought the game home with them. Perhaps their understanding of Christianity was more muscular than that of their southern compatriots: they began encouraging workers to play the sport. After being bred on the likes of bare-knuckle fighting, a nice, namby-pamby game made for ideal relaxation for the lads.
And so it went. There were few revelations in this history of rugby but there was an uncommon willingness to examine its class implications and class projects. For instance, efforts to stamp out professionalism even included a Reverend Marshall railing against the "sins" of working men, who accepted money and/or favours for playing the game. When the split came in England - rugby union in the south; rugby league in the north - the struggle for possession of oval ball football developed into a stand-off which still pertains.
The role of schools in opting for rugby union over association football reflected the social and class ferments of various periods. Seeking high social status, many schools simply chose rugby and generations of parents duly sent their sons to the club of rugby-playing schools, even when many of the boys would have preferred football. In Ireland, given the national project to promote Gaelic games, schoolboy soccer faced double discrimination. Even now, with the middle-classes increasingly attracted to soccer, the social status of rugby and the officially favoured status of Gaelic sports remain strong.
As social history, The Union Game is rugby's attempted answer to Kicking & Screaming, the excellent Beeb series on the history of soccer. "Rugby football," said Timothy Chandler of Kent State University (what do Yanks know about it?) "was initially used as a form of social control to tire out boys who looked on schoolmasters as their social inferiors." Almost two centuries on, you can still hear the echoes as the "high jinks" (delinquent behaviour if you've got the wrong address), the drinking and the vulgar songs sung by strapping, 14-stone adolescents endure. Feminists and class warriors hate such stuff, of course, but society's would-be officer cadre continues to be moulded by it all in the name of tradition. Dr Arnold was the spin doctor of his day.
THERE was a change of class milieu in Eureka Street, the new four-part drama series produced by Euphoria Films for BBC Northern Ireland "in association with RTE". Set in contemporary Belfast, it has been adapted by screenwriter Donna Franceschild from the novel by Robert McLiam Wilson. "All stories are love stories," suggests the opening line. Well, perhaps. Anyway, in sending up green and orange, it is a black comedy, which features the kind of language you'd hear in a rugby changing room. But it is patchy too, careering wildly at times between the perceptively humane and the designer pathological.
The central characters are Chuckie Lurgan (Mark Benton) and Jake Jackson (Vincent Regan). Chuckie is a 30-year-old Prod, unemployed, overweight and living at home with his mother. His friend, Jake, is a Taig who works as a repo-man. Dervla Kirwan, Sorcha Cusack, Marie Jones and Elisabeth Rohm also feature. Anyway, no-hoper Chuckie, tired of being the butt of jokes from his barflies-with-attitude friends, dreams up a couple of business scams. As a result, he lands not only on his feet but in the bed of a blonde siren.
Chuckie's first scam is funny, all right. Overhearing two middle-aged women talk about intimacies, he decides to move into the sex toys business. Chuckie is skint, of course, but he places an ad for "giant dildos" at £9.99 each. When £42,000 worth of cheques arrives, he reasons that by stamping each one with "giant dildo refund" before returning it, nobody is going to present it at their local bank. After that, scamming a £1.2 million grant from the Ulster Development Board is an easy morning's work.
Jake's progress is rockier. He beds barmaid Mary and is promptly flattened by Mary's intended, Paul, an RUC man. We see him clash with Aoirghe Jenkins (Dervla Kirwan), a republican vixen and know that rocky romance will follow on from solid hatred. Along the way, there are digs at such business guff as "development capital" and "unit profit" and at the Peace Train and Seamus Heaney. There's also a wonderfully psychopathic loyalist, whose "nice thoughts" revolve around genocidal attacks on all Taigs. Director Adrian Shergold does manage to instill a sense of black parody, but at the cost of an over-the-top liveliness which sometimes slips towards slapstick.
Still, Eureka Street, despite its patchiness and rather forced delight in using foul language, does tap into the humanity of Belfast. In that, it is anti-war by being pro-people. But laced with the observation and wit is a sometimes irritating sense of self-satisfaction. Belfast is, of course, an ideal setting for black comedy; but the city, like all cities, contains shades of grey which are not illuminated by pushing parody too close to pantomime. There is humour in this one, all right, but sometimes it just tries too hard.
Rather more sober was The Troubled Dean, Bruce Arnold's revisionist documentary about Jonathan Swift. In the "all stories are love stories" vein, it theorised that Swift could marry neither Esther Johnson (Stella) nor Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa). Stella was out because, the argument was made, she was Swift's niece, while marrying Vanessa would have forced the great satirist to reveal that he was born outside of wedlock. Clearly, there's a satire inside all of this. Is, for instance, a tormentor of hypocrisy allowed any skeletons in his own cupboard?
A risk with such an extrinsic approach to a writer and his writing is that a kind of literary groupiedom may prevail. How crucial are the details of Swift's life compared to the power of his prose? Are such matters inextricable? In fairness to Arnold, resplendent in white hat and white jacket with deliriously foppish red handkerchief billowing from its breast pocket, this was a balanced and quite thorough piece. It consulted academics, clergymen and a shrink (appropriately, Anthony Clare of St Patrick's) to weigh the arguments.
It's accepted that, intellectually, Swift's roots are in the rationalism characteristic of late 17th-century England. His "air of detachment," suggested Clare, "makes him work as a satirist". Well, fair enough. Jonathan Swift did rail against the professions, injustice, hypocrisy and obsequiousness. But if the programme's claims are true, the power of existing social mores clearly inhibited him from the type of full-blown, confessional autobiography sought by publishers these days. Tom Arnold would understand Bruce Arnold's documentary.
Finally, Seeking Pleasure: Clubs was full of people whose sense of class would make rugby's big-wigs look like democratic socialists. "In my day, one didn't apply - one had to be asked" to join a club, grinned a thoroughly smug man with a thoroughly smug pencil moustache. This was at the outset. After that, the snobbery really took fire, blazing through the English countryside of "wellies, terriers and Land Rovers" with a ferocity that made even parody redundant.
A chubby bloke named Richard, a member of an "exclusive" gun club and a "gentleman's" club in London, defended his behaviour. He said that the London club was "an ideal place for the boys to talk about matters of state, which the girls aren't hugely interested in". The "boys" and the "girls" - don't you love it? We met other blokes into fox-hunting and falconry and a woman who said she had been "a working deb" in the 1950s. Her recollection of a youthful walk on the wild side involved strolling around Picadilly with no hat. Brazen hussey!
There was too the usual nonsense about "old money" and "new money". We saw "ladies who lunch" and "blonde, professional shoppers". Belinda, who said she "waaked in the mediah", lunched; Victoria shopped. Fortnum & Mason, Harvey Nicholls and Harrods bags were everywhere. All of this clubbing was defended on the grounds of keeping tradition alive. The fact that these "traditions" are being kept alive by people with a vested interest in their retention was not mentioned. It's not as if snobs are the only people keen to preserve cultures which, they adjudge, have served them well. But conveniently labelling self-interest as civilised behaviour, many of these people emitted a jockstrap-strength stench of narcissism which wouldn't be tolerated even in a rugby changing room.