A program which crams football with a fanbase of over half a million people into an hour and half of barely digestible nano-spat shorthand at crackhead-o’clock on Sunday Morning – yup, this is The Football League Show. Viewers are lucky if they even get the scores, let alone feast their eyes on highlights their retinas have time to transmit to their brain; upon the introduction oftheir anticipated match, fans are forced to secure eyelids to their forehead using hairclips as blinking would literally halve the coverage.
The show opens with Manish Bhasin inexplicably introducing the program hanging from the studio scaffolding, the cameraman visibly flinching as he recovers from wildly scanning the room to locate the wayward presenter and get a decent head shot. You can almost feel the lensjockey’s frown from behind his gear, dumbfounded that Manish has scaled a 14 foot wall in order to announce the overture from the rafters instead of sitting behind a desk like any normal anchor.
The fondling of convention doesn’t stop there. Next we are greeted by Lizzie Greenwood-Hughes, a smile literally tattooed on her face, sat ON a desk to let the viewers know how busy she is handling all your pointless grammatical molestations.
She tells us that Dave from Scunthorpe had a great trip to Plymouth, while everyone except Dave and Lizzie couldn’t give a flying grunt-satchel. In fact Dave has probably gone to bed by now as dawn approaches, leaving me wondering why Lizzie can’t just mail the prat back in her own time; sparing us the tedium and afford the show more time to spend on, I don’t know: FOOTBALL? instead of wasting air time on this grinwit riffling through her sad inbox.
Back to Manish, a good 15 minutes wasted on vacuity; Pleasant as it is to see him back on the ground again, he is now joined by a man whose face is so inhumanly dull if he stood still outside a village shop people would post letters in it.
Steve Claridge admirably compliments his looks with his voice and personality – a sentence from the thumb-shaped pundit manages to sound less like a human opinion and more like a balloon being slowly deflated in a sink of marmite.
Next we are treated to the spectacle of two extended highlights of games the BBC has pre-empted to be less entertaining than a busker whistling, once again lacking the foresight to identify any of the other classic goal drenched encounters. Ingeniously this leads the viewers to actually look forward to another bloated segment of Lizzie’s tedious collection of monosyllabic
junkmail.
Manish and the foot-with-a-face-drawn-on-it discuss the games briefly before viewers are jerked awake by the terrifying fear their life might be flashing before their eyes, before the relief that as they didn’t play that much football it must be the hyperdrive data injection of the rest of the leagues football highlights. The summaries are so short It’s like the Beeb are trying to implant each match subliminally into your brain without you noticing; you think you fell asleep during the show but in the morning you awake and are mysteriously aware Zebroski scored for Torquay United in the 83rd minute.
Insult is added to injury as the BBC suck any hope of these rushed micro-clips providing even an ounce of entertainment by ensuring the voiceover lets you know a team scores before the ball is in the net. Perhaps they should apply this bizarre device to all their programs, announcing Phil is going to lay Peggy out with a bottle of Pernod five seconds before he walks into the Queen Vic during an episode of Eastenders, and running the name of the winning contestant along the bottom of the screen at the start of The Weakest Link.
In an attempt to include everybody the show has entertained nobody, reduced coverage of each viewers club to quantum time in order to appease the solitary league 2 supporter still awake at 2am and read out Ian Bumwit’s text declaring the manager of Bleakport Rangers doesn’t know what he is doing.
The Championship surely deserves more than this? Stop mucking about on the roof Manish, find a co-host whose day job doesn’t revolve around impersonating furniture, save the league 1 and 2 stuff for online, and tell Lizzie I have no interest in the contents of her Nokia unless it has longer highlights of the Reading V Burnley game.
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great article! I can’t stand the football league show, doesn’t entertain, might as well just watch final score lol
Agree with some of the criticisms regarding the structure and production values of the show itself. However the argument that the show should just concentrate on the Championship is garbage.
If you’re going to take that elitist view, then stick the Championship online too and let the BBC concentrate on the Prem, which is where the audience is.