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Irish Examiner
a day ago
- Sport
- Irish Examiner
Dunphy's BBC debate a nostalgic reminder of English crisis never being far away
Nostalgia for the 1990s remains heavy. Just look at all those stadiums and parks the Gallaghers are filling. Football from the late 20th century has a similar cachet. No video assistant referees, no sportswashing; just good, hard, honest, simple fare, when men were men and pressing was what you did to your Burton suit. If the past is a foreign country then a recent BBC Archive release is a primary source of a time when the continental import remained exotic and not the dominant division of labour. 'Is English Football In Crisis?' asks an edition of On The Line in October 1993, broadcast the night before Graham Taylor's England played a key World Cup qualifier in Rotterdam. You know the match: Brian Moore correctly reading Ronald Koeman's free-kick – 'he's gonna flick one' – and the pathos of Taylor's hectoring of the linesman as England's hopes of qualifying for USA '94 sink into the briny. Such is the soap opera of the English game – its warring factions, its unrelenting thirst for cash – that a crisis is often close, though now further down the food chain than the England team and the Premier League. A televised meeting of 2025's key actors is near unimaginable considering the secrecy many owners maintain, the global span from whence they come and many battles already being in camera through lawyers. The number of talking heads and influencers willing to step into the gaps is almost too grotesque to countenance. Snapshot to 1993 however, 14 months into the life of the Premier League, an entity barely mentioned over 40 minutes, and a room of football men are vehemently defending their corners. Just one woman is visible; the future sports minister Kate Hoey, and just one black face; that of Brendon Batson, deputy chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association. He remains wordless. Read More Hallgrímsson facing Brady blow after calf injury rules veteran out of World Cup qualifiers A raven-haired John Inverdale operates as a Robert Kilroy-Silk/Jerry Springer figure as various blokes in baggy suits – 'some of the most influential and thoughtful people in football' is Inverdale's billing – fight their corners. Here is a time before gym-buff execs, when male-pattern baldness is still legally allowed in boardrooms and exec boxes, when a moustache is anything but ironic. 'The whole game is directed towards winning rather than learning,' complains John Cartwright, recently resigned coach at the Lilleshall national academy, a less than gentle loosener. England's Football Association is swiftly under attack from Hoey over being 'out of touch'. Enter Jimmy Hill, a Zelig of football as player, manager, chair, the revolutionary behind the 1961 removal of the maximum wage, major figure – on and off screen – behind football's growth as a television sport. Few have filled the role of English football man so completely and his responses to Hoey are dismissive, truculent. 'You can only attack one question at a time and I find the attacks are so ignorant,' he rails, defending English coaching. Hill's stance has not travelled well. Within three years, Arsène Wenger, among others, would be upending the sanctity of English coaching exceptionalism. A short film from the ever gloomy Graham Kelly follows. The then-Football Association chief executive dolefully advertises his body's youth development plan before David Pleat's description of English youngsters as merely 'reasonable' rather blows Kelly's cover. Former Manchester City manager Malcolm Allison, by 1993 a long-lost 1960s revolutionary, declares England's kids were behind Ajax's as early as the late-1950s. 'Big Mal', demeanour far more On The Buses than On The Line, cuts the dash of ageing rebel, an Arthur Seaton still restless in his dotage, cast to the fringes as Cassandra. Next the programme's wild card; Eamon Dunphy, footballer turned bestselling writer. The irascible face of Irish punditry for many decades seizes the stage with typical barbed lyricism, hunting down the stuffed shirts who run the game, full j'accuse mode adopted from his opening words. 'English football has historically drawn its talent from the streets but unfortunately it has left its inspiration in the gutter,' he begins his own short film. Dunphy then lashes the 'merchant class' that 'have always wielded power', kicks against the 'subservient', celebrating football's 'free spirited' outsiders. Read More Adam Idah needs competition to thrive, says Celtic boss Brendan Rodgers 'Football's greatest men have usually been its saddest – ignored, betrayed or patronised,' says Dunphy, soon enough labelling English football media coverage as 'banal'. 'Where is football's Neville Cardus?' he asks, referencing the Guardian's legendary cricket writer, setting a slew of fellow journalists, including the late David Lacey, also of this parish, on defensive footings. Cast in 1993 as rabble-rousing agent of chaos from across the water, Dunphy would declare himself an Anglophile in his 2013 autobiography, appreciative of the freedom found in 1960s Manchester compared to the illiberal Ireland he came from. Here he despairs for what made English football once so magical, bemoaning Allison's estrangement and that Hill's experience was also confined to the sidelines. Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein, a prime Premier League's architect, is next for a Dunphy dagger. 'You seem exceedingly smug about the idea of kids having to pay more for their identity' is a laser-guided attack on replica shirts being replaced each summer. It proves a tinderbox moment. Hill and Professional Footballers' Association chair Gordon Taylor soon fly at each other. 'Get yer facts right, Jim,' hisses Taylor as the subject of player wages ignites a bonfire fanned further by agent Eric Hall's 'monster monster' smirks. Inverdale calls for order and concludes with a round-robin from which Pleat's 'you need an impossible man, a democratic dictator right at the top of football' sounds positively frightening. Somewhere in Pleat's logic may lie the UK government's imminent imposition of an independent football regulator, a process that led today's power brokers into a sustained, bloody battle against such interference. Fast-forward 32 years, through Premier League and Champions League dominance, international failures and successes, foreign talent and investment, profit and sustainability, splintering media landscapes, women's football embodying national pride, much has changed and yet self-interest remains the darkest heart of English football.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Four Seasons' Brings Middle-Age Malaise on Vacation
In an episode of the new Netflix comedy The Four Seasons, Tina Fey's character, Kate, compares a situation to Zelig, an obscure Woody Allen film from 1983. Kate's husband Jack (Will Forte) sarcastically replies, 'Oh, that's a really fresh reference!' The Four Seasons is perhaps an even less fresh reference. The story of three couples — Jack and Kate, Nick (Steve Carell) and Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver), and Danny (Colman Domingo) and Claude (Marco Calvani) — who go on four memorable vacations together over the course of a year, it's a remake of a 1981 movie that was Alan Alda's film directorial debut. Alda's version was well-reviewed, and it grossed over $50 million (nearly $180 million in 2025 dollars), a testament to how beloved Alda was at the time as the leading man on the hit sitcom M*A*S*H. But it hasn't lingered in the collective memory the way some other films of its vintage have, in part because its target audience was moviegoers who were middle-aged, like its stars, back then. More from Rolling Stone Four Tech Billionaires Watch the World They Created Burn in New 'Mountainhead' Teaser Marriages and Friendships Are Put to the Test in Tina Fey's Cozy Netflix Series 'The Four Seasons' Tina Fey's 'The Four Seasons,' Based on the 1981 Movie, Sets Netflix Premiere Date It was also released at a time when there weren't constantly family-friendly movie options in theaters every weekends, so some parents who didn't want to hire a babysitter took their kids along to The Four Seasons. I saw it as a seven-year-old, but recall nothing other than the distinct feeling that it was a film in no way made for someone my age. Fey is a little older than me — she would have just turned 11 when it came out. And apparently either the film or her interactions with Alda when he guest-starred in several episodes of 30 Rock (playing Jack Donaghy's biological father) left enough of an impression that she, along with past and present collaborators Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield, decided to adapt The Four Seasons for television. Hey, at least it's a relatively unusual deviation(*) from the kinds of things that usually get remade in the IP Is Everything era of TV! (*) A few other Seventies and Eighties films for adults have gotten similar treatment in recent years, with Showtime at one point offering new versions of both American Gigolo and The Man Who Fell to Earth, both of which came and went without much notice. Since even the 1981 movie's most laudatory reviews suggested Alda had shot several episodes of television and strung them together, the switch in mediums is an easy fit. And the nature of the story lends itself to being told in this format, with two episodes apiece for each calendar season, and thus each trip the group takes together. But despite the pedigree of that cast and of Fey, Fisher (who also created Never Have I Ever), and Wigfield (who created Great News and Peacock's Saved by the Bell legasequel) as writers, The Four Seasons never quite makes a convincing argument for why its story needed to be revisited today. There are some amusing moments, and a few genuinely poignant ones, but on the whole it feels thin — less a TV show than an excuse for a bunch of talented people, several of them old friends IRL, to hang out together in a variety of pretty locales. It's like a Grown-Ups film, but without the fart jokes. Our story begins in spring, when the group traditionally assembles at Nick and Anne's beautiful lake house. The other duos have problems — Jack and Kate's marriage has become a bit too routine, while Claude feels Danny is being too cavalier about some age-appropriate health news — but the main source of tension comes from Nick's confession that he wants to divorce Anne. 'We're like co-workers at a nuclear facility!' he says of how lifeless their marriage feels. 'We sit in the same room all night monitoring different screens!' After a cameo by Alda himself — by far the funniest and most touching part of the whole affair, with Alda proving he's still got it, even at 89 and dealing with Parkinson's — we shift to summer, where the other couples are struggling to get used to Nick's much younger new girlfriend Ginny (Erika Henningsen) while on vacation at a comically crunchy eco-friendly resort she picked out for them. Then there's an autumn parents' weekend trip to college to visit the daughters of Jack, Kate, Nick, and Anne, before the season concludes with parallel winter lodge stays for the now-splintered group(*). (*) Given that most of these friendships go back decades, it's impressive that they've made it so long taking multiple trips together per year — as much for the logistics of it as for the fact that nobody got sick of each other until this point. There are some solid bits of physical comedy here and there, particularly in the summer episodes, and dramatic moments land from time to time. There's also a late plot development that turns the show into a weirdly specific piece of typecasting for one of its actors. Mostly, though, Fey and company seem content to coast on vibes and the chemistry among the cast. The results are pleasant, but rarely more than that. Nick's daughter Lila (Julia Lester) accuses him of having a 'pretty basic midlife crisis,' and the first half of that phrase applies to most of The Four Seasons. Everybody seemed to have a good time making it. Sometimes, that spirit becomes a bit infectious. But just as various characters keep questioning why the group chose to go on one trip or another, you will probably come to the end of the season wondering why this impressive group of people decided this was the project they wanted to join forces to remake. If it ends up being a hit, Alda directed three other films, including one, Sweet Liberty, set behind the scenes of a Hollywood production. That's a subject Fey might know a thing or two about turning into a TV show. All eight episodes of The Four Seasons are now streaming on Netflix. I've seen the whole season. 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