Two noteworthy developments in British entertainment were announced yesterday. One was about a much discussed cooking show, and the other about a much discussed soccer team, and so by definition infinitely more tedious.
The cooking show is The Great British Bake Off, the much-imitated and semi-duplicated staple of oven-based society, has aficionados everywhere, and remains a chief repository of Defector's very limited supply of admiration. There, the venerable Prue Leith, who replaced the equally venerable Mary Berry as the charming counterpoint to Paul Hollywood (real name: Paul Hollywood), announced that she would be leaving the show for its 17th series; her replacement would be another maven of televised British cuisine, Nigella Lawson. People who eat better than us swear by Lawson and her sometime wink-wink-nudge-nudge descriptions of the ingredients and their preparation, so well done to them. At least our own kitchen help thinks so, and who are we to question their views, especially when they could put ground glass in the company picnic burger meat and we would never know?
It is more difficult to stomach Manchester United's plan for, and this is The Athletic's description, "a dramatised retelling of the club’s history . . . similar in style to The Crown." Good lord. Can we get a window-quality slider, double-paned with cheese, please?
We (briefly) hesitate to condemn something that is currently only in the development stage; it is best practices, in cases like this, to wait for the catastrophic failures to reveal themselves. But also: this already reeks of suck, with a side of hurl. As we know from our reading, no club thinks more of itself, while accomplishing nothing but accumulated scorn, ridicule, and hatred over the past decade, than Manchester United. Think of the Dallas Cowboys only with a less likable Jerry Jones. If you combined the two franchise's coaches and ranked them, Mike McCarthy would finish first. We rest our case.
So a I-By-Me tell-nothing tale about a team that currently needs all the propaganda it can sell is already a loser on its face. The club which once owned Europe is now working on a 13-year-run of mockery and nausea, the butt of every joke told every possible way from every soccer pundit in existence. This includes the dozen or so former Manchester United players scattered across the media landscape, all of whom keep busily employed by slagging their former employers while endlessly trying to convince the rest of us that the next coach will certainly bring back the glory days, at least until the first defeat has them all braying for the next next coach. Manchester United has reduced itself to being interesting only to see how people can invent new ways of describing them as enemies of the people.
To be clear, they don't. But to make a dramatized version of their story, which will be long on glory and therefore short on the present, perhaps with a brief interlude to cover the 1958 Munich air disaster, is already problematic. In truth, that's the docudrama right there, on the basis that no great drama can be told too often as long as it isn't told too horribly or by the wrong people. The crash and the decade that followed is all the story any Man U addict could reasonably want, and it doesn't need Man U's bankroll and control to get it told; indeed, David Peace wrote a novel about it just last year. No movie has ever been made of it, though several TV documentaries were aired on the 50th anniversary.
The fact that the club will have a hand in every part of production, as is the way of most sports documentaries since The Last Dance broke the definition of the word, only makes it worse because at best it will be a carefully culled set of platitudes that only makes the club look uniformly brilliant, and at worst, because it is being controlled by the people who run Manchester United, it will almost certainly be a thousand stables filled with excrement.
And to what end? Most Manchester United fans, and there are still millions despite their paltry recent return on emotional investment, know all the stories, and will find all the obvious omissions—every moment since the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson, for example—irksome. Most non-Manchester United Fans will find it to be standard Man U preening on the halfshell. Most documentary fans will find the story a crashing bore for all the expected reasons. And "dramatized" could mean any flight of bullshit-grade fancy, up to and including Louis Van Gaal managing the team to three straight trebles. or the despised Glazer family that owns the club failing to ruin it. "Dramatised" means dramatized, after all.
It should not be surprising that the Man U folks have come late to this "solution" to their cascade of public relations mudslides. Given that The Crown was singular in its delivery, most sports documentaries are now exercises in self-congratulation, and the Man U story has already been told countless times, right down to a time-lapsed scene of every time Roy Keane punched someone in the throat just to see the expression on the victim's face. And because Manchester United will surely have final say on all the details, the project will be powered by the same keen sense of turbocharged narcissism that Michael Jordan provided to The Last Dance, only without the benefits of the COVID quarantine. In that way, if maybe only in that way, The Last Dance was a godsend; because it came first, we hadn't been attuned to the legion of half-developed and underbaked versions of other sports docu-plops that have come since. Not to mention the housebound audiences that needed something properly distracting to keep from killing each other in the family room.
This is an idea whose time has long since passed, and since we are relatively sure that it will end with Ferguson's 2013 retirement and ascent into Scottish heaven (whatever that's supposed to be) and omit the entirety of the Glazers' ham-handed reign, we can view it with the proper amount of skepticism. In other words, it will bear the same relationship to reality that Angels In The Outfield has to the actual Los Angeles Angels, and those who watch it will either be forewarned or feel cheated. Put another way, even Nigella Lawson couldn't save this bad boy, even if she delivered a cake to every viewer from her own flour-encrusted hands.
