TV WATCH

THIS MONTH’S SCREEN REVIEW

The past is a foreign country, it’s full of idiots. BBC Archives (YouTube) continues to offer glimpses into football’s prehistoric age, pre-1992 . Six Days To Saturday is hidden away here, following the lives of Swindon Town’s players and staff; in 1963, newly promoted from Division Three. We smile at these people’s droll customs as the manager and chairman drink tea from china cups and saucers, two of the players join a game of road football and another passes some weekday downtime shooting pigeons in the terraces.

As a teenage Don Rogers drives off to visit his parents in Midsomer Norton, the camera and the narrator’s voice accompany him: “They go to the cinema two or three times a week, drive a little aimlessly in the country, visit the bowling alley… mindless pursuits… but a professional footballer cannot afford to be too interested in the world. He lives in suspension until next Saturday.”

The tone of the commentary is nervously anthropological; one concept the establishment truly fears is a leisured working class. Bobby Woodruff is filmed in a betting shop, a visit the voiceover has decided is “more of a gesture than a compulsive habit” (although suspiciously he is greeted immediately by name by all the regulars). The players are depicted as models of modesty and virtue, ambassadors for their town. In short, although they are relatively well paid, have a lotof time on their hands and haven’t read Thackeray, they are not considered a threat to the status quo.

Of course, there is the occasional hoary turn of phrase here, such as when the manager’s youth policy is outlined: “Bert Head has pursued a single-minded policy of finding local 15-year-old boys and blooding them young.” In 1963, this would still have been unintentionally funny, but looking back from today there is an additional absurdity in the BBC’s still intact Baden-Powell filter. As Swindon’s fortunes rose, “the crowds swelled out hysterically with teenage girls and middle-aged women”, says the narrator, his voice seasoned with the sonic quality of a man reflexively retreating a step.

In its infancy, television brought new people into our lives, specifically Richard Dimbleby and Muffin the Mule. This was shocking enough, but nowadays you can become acquainted with half the world’s population through your screen, for noother reason than that someone, somewhere, thought it a good idea. The very phrase Meet The Owens (Amazon Prime) is the reason so many of us no longer leave the house after 6pm.

But Michael Owen is waiting for us on his private interview sofa, eager to prove, through the adoption of a permanent expression of animated glee, that he is no longer the eerily wooden young man witnessed on previous media outings. In the first three episodes (there are six in all, but, as with Paradise Lost , you get the gist early), Michael repeatedly enters rooms seething with equestrian types, inserting carrying quips in the space left for him. “He’ll get my humour soon!” he shouts across at a crew member at a racing function. Hugo Palmer, head trainer at Owen’s stables, tells us that horse auctions “are long, hard days, so his jolly personality gets us through”, in the way aristocrats will praise working-class people as if they’re one of the family Alsatians. At another race meeting, Owen tells one of the co-owners of the horses he stables: “I’m no oil painting, but you are one of my ugliest owners.” It seemed, from the halting response, that here was another man yet to complete his journey to the appreciation of Owen’s wit.

All this is not really his fault. The programme makers have decided that the combination of an ex-footballer, social media influencer (daughter Gemma), horses and expensive décor throws a blanket over the entire demographic of 21st century Britain. Owen just marches around in a tiny gilet in the middle of it, one of the more benign examples of arrested development.

Teleologically speaking, Meet The Owens exists, with a bloom of similar shows, to prepare us for a time when there will be no new dramatic content, just rolling news and celebrities filmed in big-ticket milieux . Just two short scenes provide the type of emotional flashpoint that these productions prize as windfall: one when James Owen is told by the director that his father has confided on camera that he loves him, and one when a jackdaw gets into the house. Two minutes of natural human drama there, among hours of horse talk and hale banter. Cameron Carter