Jesus, how good is this beer? It’s light and easygoing but full of flavour at the same time. If I was having this at a beer fest I’d be in danger of giving everything else a miss and necking 38 pints. It’s not quite flowery but there’s a really pleasant taste at the side of the tongue and it even smells good. Definitely a candidate for my new favourite beer.

As for last night’s other beers, they were all pretty much okay. The St Edmunds was really standard, noticeable mainly for its strong “beery” smell. By that I mean the smell you used to get when walking past a pub and it stunk of pure PUB. Once over you used to get the same thing outside a brewery, but they seem to have filtered the smell out these days – a pity. The Wayland Smithy, which was allegedly “fiery and aromatic”, did actually have a bit of bite to it but to call it fiery you’d have to be someone who needs a glass of water to cool down after a korma. And the Circle Master, well, not much really stood out about it. Perhaps they all suffered in comparison to the Harvest Pale, and it’s easy to see why that’s won a few awards in its short life.

Castle Rock · Circle Master · Harvest Pale · St Edmunds · Wayland Smithy

Tonight I’m round at my cousin’s having a cheap night in because of the recession and global economic crises and the rising price of rice and AAAARGH PANIC WE’RE ALL POOR!!! No doubt they’ll be on the vino and, as much as I do like the odd glass now and then, it’s a night on the ales for me. I’ve come to learn that red wine can be tremendous if you drink it in the right company, with someone you can trust to drink at the same pace as you, but if you get even slightly out of kilter with one another then an hour down the line, you’ll feel like your head weighs 20 tons while your mate will have entered into a Jagermeister-based drinking game with the neighbours.

The jazzy label honestly did make me buy it.

I’ve picked up a few bottles from Morrisons, anyway. They’re doing four bottles for £5.50 round here at the moment which ain’t so bad. First up is Greene King’s St Edmunds, a golden beer with a label that stands out a mile. I don’t know about you but the labels really do work on me, and I don’t see any point denying it. Maybe it’s because I don’t really care much what it says on the back because I like all kinds of beer, but the label says more to me while I’m looking through 50 beers on the shelf. Is that bad?

Next up I’ve got White Horse’s Wayland Smithy. Morrisons describe this as “fiery and aromatic” which is probably shorthand for really bitter and smelly, making you cock your head to one side after every gulp to figure out what the hell you’re actually drinking. Hopefully Wychwood’s Circle Master will be a bit more reliable, and the final of the four is Castle Rock’s Harvest Pale which from everything I’ve read sounds like a classic golden ale.

My usual success rate based on randomly picking beers based on their labels is 50%, so I’ll probably get a couple of really good beers tonight and a couple I could take or leave. I’d rather have it that way than be one of those gits blocking the aisles with a trolley full of Andrex while he inspects the labels through ancient reading glasses, merrily reading out loud the full list of ingredients to all and sundry.

As you may guess, I much prefer buying beer from pubs.

Castle Rock · Circle Master · Greene King · Harvest Pale · Morrisons · St Edmunds · Wayland Smithy · White Horse · Wychwood

I was contemplating taking a look at the “Bent ‘n Bongs” festival in Atherton this Saturday afternoon, as it’s only about an hour on the train from scummy old Blackburn and it’d be about the same distance up for a mate coming from Warrington. A few things have put me off though and instead I’ll be spending the afternoon watching a play in Preston and then hitting a few of the excellent ale pubs down Friargate. The Old Black Bull, the Dog & Partridge and the Brittania all spring to mind for the excellent choice of beers they always have on, and all within 30 seconds of each other. Happy days.

Anyway, what’s stopped me going to this one?

• £5 entry to a four hour session? That’s at the upper end of the scale this year and I don’t like how they force you to take a glass and programme. I’ve got so many festival glasses already that if I die young and they go to empty my house they’ll think I had the early stages of senile hoarding disease. I don’t bloody want any more and would happily have my £2 deposit back. The same goes for the programme… who apart from tickers needs more than one per group? Are they forcing it on you so they can sell it to advertisers better – “we will definitely reach x number of eyes”?
• What’s going on with a three hour break between afternoon and evening sessions? What do they do, grab something to eat and spend the next two hours forming a loosely-knit jazz collective? This put me off because as someone who’d have travelled down for the afternoon session, I’d be forced to leave at 4pm and I’m not going to hang around for three hours just so I can pay another fiver to go back for an hour before my train home.
• Their website has no evidence of glorious MILFs of previous years.

It’s a shame as it looked alright judging by the photo below, but this is really indicative of the way some festivals are going now. They know who they’re appealing to and know they can get away with little tricks to boost the income, but they’ll never know how many people there are out there just like me who looked at the website and just thought “maybe not”.

It's all gone Pete Bong.

Atherton · Beer festival · Beers · Bent and Bongs

Having really enjoyed Manchester’s winter beer festival at the weekend, I’ve spent the afternoon looking over the web to update my calendar of festivals this year. They’re not something I want to do every week and I already have Pendle lined up for the weekend after next, but when I spotted Bristol on the list I felt tempted straight away. I have a mate down there and having been last year, loved the place. Perfect, I thought – a nice weekend jaunt with a few mates in mid-March.

But, hmmm, hang on. Where’s the “times and prices” page so familiar to every other festival website? It’s just a one page affair, a block of black and white. And the system for getting tickets… well, maybe I’ve had a long day in front of the computer, but it took me a good few reads to get my head round what they’re doing. I’m still not quite sure if I’m eligible, or if they even want me to come. There are lots of bold bits about places and times which are pretty meaningless to me. Given that you can only buy them in person I presume this is strictly a local festival for local people – no outsiders, please.

This deeply saddens me as on the evidence of previous years, Bristol beer fest is a honeypot for MILFs.

Women do not do anything more attractive than smile with a pint. Fact.	Thanks to science, we now know females can safely drink ale.
Mmmm... strict but friendly English teacher making you stay behind...	When God invented "phwoar", he was philandering with this woman.

Once again it’s a kick in the teeth for the grim old north. I feel like Kes in a version of Kes where he gets invited down to London to be best mates with a lion-zebra hybrid but when he gets to the zoo it’s had a really awful fire and he can just smell charred raccoon meat, an acrid stench which never quite leaves him for the rest of his life. That’s like me and my MILFs, that. Well stuff you, Bristol, with your elaborate ticketing system and gaudy display of your MILF’s wares. There’s nowt so bad about a bit of black pudding and a nice warm Northern lass.

Rest in peace, Blanche, you quick-witted Northern bastard.

Beer festival · Beers · Bristol · MILF

Binge-drinking reaches the polar ice caps

It’s three weeks into the new year and I’ve taken my first step in resolving to stick to beer where beer is good, and not pour any old crap down my neck just because there’s no other choice – I must confess I am capable of drinking John Smiths Smooth if it’s the only beer going. Along with Rich and Shakes I went along to the Manchester winter beer festival at the Sheridan Suite. This is the Wembley of pubs, the Maracana of bars, the Krakatoa of quaffing. Bearded pilgrims made their way down Oldham Road in threes and fours, probably suspecting that any area with a community centre with a brightly painted mural on the wall isn’t going to be the safest. Tower flats loomed on the other side of the road and the manic shopping of central Manchester suddenly seemed a world away.

And then, the Sheridan Suite. From the outside it looks like a 1990s suburban leisure centre, the kind of place where otherwise decent people collect to play badminton badly against one another and Gordon Brittas rules with an iron fist. What a deceptive appearance, though. Passing through the doors you’re met by a group of volunteers taking the £3 entrance (£2 for CAMRA members, more of which later) and then an elevator up to the arena. The noise of a thousand chattering people grows and then the sheer scale of the place hits you. I am sure the Great British Beer Festival is held in a larger space, but this was by far the largest festival I’ve been to. My domain is usually the marquee-tent-in-a-farmer’s-field kind of affair, with 20 barrels hoiked over a bit of scaffolding and a deafening blues band pitched up at one end. This, by comparison, was industrial festivaling.

A view of a man's back.

The sheer size of the bars probably worked in their favour. We were there for the afternoon session so probably didn’t see the busiest of the day, but there was never any trouble getting served. The volunteers had the usual charming absent-mindedness, as if Help The Drinkers had sent a busload of their most regular customers down to help out for the weekend. (And what a charity that would be. Fuck Haiti, text 80450 to donate £1 to victims of Fosters near you.) The Indian food, at £5 a tray, was enough to split between three to keep us going.

And on to the beers. Half glasses were in order and they were the best I’ve ever seen with a sturdy base and a handle that made you feel less of a ponce by eliminating that rogue floating finger you get with a usual half glass. Handles were the past and they are the future, I’d say. Shakes started with a Beowulf Grendals Winter Ale at 5.8%, a “sipper”. Rich tried the Boggart 5% Seethy, though the actual name of that one has been lost to the sands of time; damn smudging pens, damn you to hell. I was particularly happy to see a Brewdog beer on the list after so long waiting and reading about them, but to be honest I found the Punk IPA really nothing out of the ordinary. At 6.2% maybe it suffered from its strength as it really isn’t what I’d have called an IPA but for the name.

Three pleasures in one: Cains, the tranny of the ale world.

Distinctly underwhelmed so far, we went on a ramble and found Mecca: the Cains stand. One summer of my life will forever be associated with the unbeatable sheer quaffability of Cains Finest, and considering that summer was spent in a Last Orders pub you can imagine how much the beer had to do. The bogs may stink of piss and forever be associated with the smashed toilet seat during its days as a gay bar, and the regulars may be cocks who live off peanuts, but with Cains on at £1.20 a pint, it seemed alright.

The Cains stand was three pleasures in one. First, that brilliant moment of seeing it in the distance, an unexpected gift from the gods. Second, the anticipation building as we wove our way towards it, still comprehending how this could be here – could it really be here? And third, hitting the bar, a first taste of Cains for a long time. Rich couldn’t say no to the Finest and gave it a 4 for “good memories”. Maybe I was just having an off-day because I normally enjoy IPAs but again, I found their elaborately-named IPA weak and my only note left against it is “naff”. Shakes found the Mild watery and at 3.2% it’s not a surprise. Perhaps it’s a parable, then, to leave good memories where they best belong – in the past.

We took another wander and found the book stalls; I only just resisted a few knocking about down there. The Derwent W & M Pale Ale at 4.4% was a good session beer and my favourite so far. Rich ended up with a Dunham Massey Xmas Ale and at 6.6% it took some drinking. Shakes meanwhile was on a Stewart 80/-, and his run of bad luck continued with all he could muster by comment being “water”. My next was a Humpty Dumpty Reedcutter, at 4.4% a very caramel beer and far too sweet for my taste; at least it wasn’t another of Shakes’ tar-jugs though, and he’d finally hit a bit of luck with a Lymestone Foundation Stone, calling it drinkable and a good change of taste. Rich maybe made a schoolboy error by going for a big name, a J W Lees Coronation St, flatteringly labelled by him as “gas”.

The notes against the programme beer list begin to betray our decaying state of mind around this point as Rich’s next beer is scribbled down as “ALL GUNS BLAZING”, a 4.3% New Moon from his nearby Leeds brewery. This kicked off the heaviest session of the afternoon as we set up camp at the end of a bar and proceeded to work our way down in a chaotic order, fitting in a Marble Pint (Shakes: “grapefruit piss”), a Marston’s Ringwood Best Bitter and a decidedly-average Molson-Coors Red Shield. The wheels were in danger of coming off as Rich, in a display of patriotism, stuck with the Yorkshire beers, describing an 8% Otley 08 as like “fucking nice wine”. Time to reign things in a bit before we became the first people to be ejected from a CAMRA festival for inciting War of the Roses-based racial violence, and we hit the Stewart Copper Cascade which I could taste absolutely nothing of, the Yale Good King Senseless which at 5.2% Shakes simply said was “right good beer” and the Wells & Youngs Youngs Spl, a tame 4.5%. With a quick MOT under his belt Rich was back on top form and finished off with a Yates Yule Be Sorry, described as “smooth (head feels)”. I really don’t know what that means.

The man who took this zoomed in this close and sent it to a global network of naughty men.

The plan for the day was to finish off with a scrumps and so we did, using Rich’s free half vouchers he won by being the 151st person to join CAMRA that weekend. Don’t believe me? I’m sure he has some proof somewhere… I know the git got a bag with a Good Beer Guide in at least. The band were due on soon, but it was time to make our way home. Reflections? A very well organised festival, a perfect number of people (in the afternoon at least) and some good beers on the go. I’d happily go again at the drop of a hat and have told people it’s worth a look. Well done to those concerned and here’s to next year.

Beers · Beowulf · Boggart · BrewDog · Cains · CAMRA · Derwent · Dunham Massey · humpty dumpty · JW Lees · Leeds brewery · Manchester · Marble · Molson-Coors · Otley brewery · Sheridan Suite · Winter Ales Festival · yates

I came of age in the mid-90s and this had plenty of benefits: great music, a golden age of British comedy, the Sega Megadrive being superceded by the space age bagel-toaster known as the Playstation and, of course, I’d learned to masturbate like I was a chronic diabetic and rubbing my willy gave me insulin- which gave me something to do instead of watching Noel’s House Party.

But, probably most gloriously of all, it meant I was still in my formative years when one of the mightiest runs of artistic greatness was in full stride. People of a particular vintage may look fondly upon 1965-68 when the Beatles went from Rubber Soul to The White Album, or maybe Powell and Pressburger’s The Archers films of the 1940s, as two concerted examples of genius in it’s pomp. But, for me and for others of a certain age and disposition, nothing quite matches the trail of wonder blazed by the animation studio at Warner Bros in the 1990s and, in particular, the people who did their opening titles.

Beginning with Tiny Toon Adventures, then Taz-Mania, followed by- and possibly best of all- Animaniacs and it’s spin-off Pinky and the Brain before culminating in the sheer balls-out lunacy of Freakazoid this represented just 5 pieces of work barely a minute long each.

And yet…

Has anyone else ever managed to use 60 seconds to create such joy even once? Or twice? Well this lot did it 5 times and they never missed a beat. Even when it becomes obvious that they’re generally written to a formula: intro, run through cast of characters, final slightly more frantic bit; these sequences still bear watching time and time again. On the subject of which:

Pixar regularly get esteemed as makers of cartoons that adults can laugh at too but they’ve got nothing for cross-generational reach on the WB crowd- especially Animaniacs which effortlessly parodied everything from Rugrats to Seinfeld to Shakespeare to Goodfellas. The ongoing success of The Simpsons has been credited with making cartoons arguably the preserve of grown ups more than kids these days but that marginalises the contibution of Warner Bros who rarely seemed to care what supposed age their audience might have been. And in the early days when the residents of Springfield were still finding their feet and engaging in clunky weekly message plays Animaniacs was already tweaking at the whole idea of infusing stories with lessons and meanings with their superbly deadpan ‘Wheel of Morality’ and slightly creepy ‘Good Idea, Bad Idea’ (which I remain convinced to this day was voiced by Al Gore).

And, of course, Homer can’t sing all the nations of the World (circa 1993) in under 2 minutes.

animaniacs · freakazoid · pinky and the brain · taz mania · theme songs · tiny toons · wb

“You’re not actually a comedian though, are you?”- Eddie Izzard to Jonathan Ross

Obviously, with Britain coming to a frozen standstill this week, news people have been pretty much stuck to reporting on chronic grit shortages, school closures and abandoned Ford Fiestas. They haven’t therefore had much spare time to go hunting for other stories to bring us- a politician could quite easily have turned up at the Iraq inquiry this week and said Blair and Bush invaded because they belived Saddam had the secret recipe for Wotsits and no-one would have noticed.

It was lucky for snowbound reporters then that Jonathan Ross was kind enough to plop some news right into their laps earlier this week by announcing that he’d be leaving the BBC after 13 years. Understandably, the media were bored of talking about frozen precipitate and joyously splashed the news all over front pages and bulletins with gay abandon, as though this wasn’t so much the story of a personality leaving a TV station rather than that of God abandoning heaven in order to pursue a career as a deity in a different Universe.

And that lead me to thinking- why the fuss? How come the news can’t get enough of Wossy when, as far as I can gather, most people don’t seem too bothered about him either way? Why does he supposedly divide opinion when I can’t find anyone who truly hates or adores him?

What, exactly, is Jonathan Ross for?

On first looks, he’s the closest British TV can get to what has, for years, been their holy grail- a homegrown Letterman, Jay Leno for the Home Counties. We’ve always wanted to do a nightly chatshow in this country but we’ve never had anyone who could pull it off- something which Graham Norton found out to his cost when he went 5 times a week and discovered there’s only so many bizarre/ironic/creepy porn sites on the Internet you can show to a faux-shocked Barbara Windsor. Channel 5 tried launching with an ill-fated attempt at a US-style talkshow hosted by the hopelessly out-of-his depth Jack Docherty, an amiable enough comic with the unfortunate luck to have the exact appearance of disappointment made flesh.

Jack Docherty- no wonder Channel 5 used to show soft porn the rest of the time

Ross always had the sense to stay weekly; as much as anything, we don’t have the money for writers or the star-pulling power for every weeknight in the UK.  He also had a crack at a topical monologue at the top of the show and, despite often straying into cloying sycophancy, he knew how to get the best out of the guests lolling on his sofa and hoping to promote their new film/book/show/attrocity. He also made sure he had an enlarged persona- though whereas Letterman goes for the cheeky laidback shaggy-dog-storyteller schtick and Leno is the slick, confident one-liner-guy, Ross built his image as the brash show-off in a way that wasn’t quite jokey enough to convince that it was an affectation. This was all fine until the Beeb allegedly gave him £18 million for 3 years work at the exact same time that everyone else on the planet was losing their jobs and shitting themselves about negative equity.

Inspired by De Niro in 'Raging Bull', Cruise bulked up for Top Gun 2

And then he went on Russell Brand’s radio show.

Post suspension he’s hardly stopped making jokes about having 3 months off at every opportunity. It’s probably meant to show he’s cheeky and he’s come out of the other side untroubled by what happened and as strong as ever. In fact, it just looks lazy.

The thing is, throughout the whole Sachs furore, the whole attitude appeared to be from most people “so what? Move on.” Except the press kept banging on about it until he had his suspension, at which point they had something new to report. Then, 12 weeks later, he returned and was all over the pages for coming back from the enforced break that only the very same papers seemed to be interested in getting him.

And his show returned to pretty much the same figures it had beforehand. Ross had become part of the national furniture- not a particularly important bit like a sofa or the front door but a lamp which sits quietly on the bookshelf. If it was to disappear, you’d notice for a bit then get used to it not being there in short order. When it came back, it’d be like nothing had changed before you knew it.

That’s Jonathan Ross that is. Except you wouldn’t give the job of hosting Film Whatever Year It Is to a lamp, despite the fact that, to paraphrase a friend of mine, the lamp’s favourite film is unlikely to be ‘Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill!’ which would immediately make it the more qualified candidate.

And the other difference between a lamp and Jonathan Ross? Simple, I wouldn’t spend time wondering why so many press inches get dedicated to a lamp while, at the same time, doing 800 words on it myself.

How the hell does he do it?

Jonathan Ross · press coverage · talkshow

If I may, a proposition: many people drink because there’s nothing better to do.

I’ve thought and thought until I scweamed and I seem to be near a vague conclusion that the lack of any better alternatives is what a lot of it basically boils down to. It is very, very easy to prevaricate about the reasons why – it’s my genes, it’s my character, it’s my job’s fault, it’s my reward – but if you cut to the chase, all of those reasons essentially end up being caused by there being no better way for a person to spend their time.

This man's purpose is to make his own limbs fall off by drinking red wine for 19 solid days.

Not everyone’s condemned to a life of slavish ale quaffing. There are a group of people for whom there is a better way to spend their time, and today it finally clicked how those people get to be that way. Flicking through The Independent I came across a short piece about a tribute to Jean Charles de Menezes, sadly not a rock tribute penned by Damon Albarn with Brian May on guitar but a mural of some sort which passing tourists in years to come will walk past with little more than a bemused glance. His family stand in front of it with faces drooping with sorrow, much as they have since the day he died in 2005. That day was the day they gained purpose.

Directly beneath this story is news of a quadriplegic sailor crossing the Atlantic. Mankind has a tremendous ability to corrupt and degrade itself, as if intelligence is waged in an unknown war against evolution, and our great fondness of the critically disabled embarking on insane endeavours to cross our widest oceans and scale our highest hills is a good example of this. The whole cast of Gladiators combined into one enormous muscular super-entity would find it a fairly challenging and pointless task to sail across a massive bit of water, yet it seems an irresistible challenge for the completely body-fucked. Would this man have fancied the job if he had limbs? Not much chance. The day he lost those limbs was the day he gained purpose.

A little later in today’s paper we hit the obituaries and see that Freya Grafin von Moltke has died. She was involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944 and then became known as an anti-Nazi worker. The last 60 years of this woman’s life have been based upon that one event; it was the day she found a purpose.

What struck me today is that there are people who shit happens to who then have a purpose for the rest of their lives. If my sister was gunned down on the tube, I’m pretty sure it’d take my life over for the next few years; going for a beer on an otherwise empty evening would cease to exist as an option. If I ran through a fiendishly-designed sawmill and lost my limbs overnight, the law of averages says I would succumb to a sudden compulsion to travel to Mars using nothing but a hand fan sellotaped to my back. If circumstances deigned I be born with access to the Fourth Reich, I’d end up plotting to blow them up; no time for gluhwein, thankyou. As it is, I’m just meandering through life with no one purpose distinct to anyone else.

My observation of the matter is that life happens to a minority, life is created by a smaller minority and for the rest, life drifts by with an opiate of choice; English society today mostly chooses beer to fill the gaps.

Beers · society

Picture This:

Team A are playing Team B.  Team A have, playing up front for them, a striker who cost millions of pounds and is being payed a further 50 grand or so a week to do one job- score.  In the course of the game he has 3 or 4 gilt-edged chances to do just that and misses every one of them.  Therefore, Team A fail to find the net all match despite dominating.  Meanwhile, at some point, Team B break up field and earn a contentious penalty which the referee has to reward in a split-second having seen the action only once from just a single angle.  Team B score the penalty and win 1-0.  Later on it is seen, after slowing the action to a crawl and viewing it from numerous vantage points, that the penaly maybe shouldn’t have been given.  And so, who does the manager of Team A blame for his side’s defeat: the striker or the referee?

We all know the answer.

Not a week goes by without a good number of managers and Alan Green blaming a referee for getting every decision wrong in the course of a particular match.  The officials, so we are lead to believe, are incompetent, useless and- let’s face it, enough managers get as close as they legally can to suggesting this- corrupt.  This is all despite the fact that referees go through a long recruitment process to get into the ranks of the professional game and their performances are constantly and stringently monitored.  And yet, so the bosses and Green constantly suggest, all we end up with are blind, useless idiots who couldn’t give a correct decision with a gun to their heads and 4 hours of replays from two hundred different angles at up to 3000% zoom.

Can’t we all finally agree that this is utter conkers and of no use to the game of football whatsoever?  If referees are constantly getting big decisions wrong, like Thierry Henry’s handball or about 75% of yellow cards dished out while Alan Green’s commentating, then can’t we just all agree that the job of the referee has been rendered impossible in the modern game.  The system of one ref and two men on the line was invented decades and decades ago when the players smoked 40 a day and worked in smelting plants for most of the week.  Now they’re super-trained athletes who ping the ball around the field at 200mph and yet the system to officiate their play is exactly the same.  Of course decisions are going to be made incorrectly if this is the case, and the refs get absolutely no help whatsoever beyond a momentary glimpse of an incident, usually with a couple of players in the way.

I’m not writing this because I know what the solution is- whether it’s video technology or extra officials or whatever anyone else comes up with- but because I know the game won’t be improved if referees are still being talked about as if doing the job perfectly for 90 minutes time after time was as possible as it clearly isn’t.  If the media for once challenged managers who lazily reflected on referee’s decisions as the reasons why they’ve been beaten that day rather than questioning what circumstances caused the ref to make that decision in the first place then maybe we’d get somewhere and maybe the call to FIFA to give referees some assistance in whatever form would become irresistable.

And best of all, Alan Green would have nothing left to say.

Alan Green · football · referees

Personally I don’t think the Americans are such a bad bunch at the end of the day, in much the same way I think a bit of crack now and then doesn’t do you any bad. What they do suck at big time, though, is sports. Not sport itself – they’re fast little bastards and tall as trees when need be – but their sports are full-on all-round lame. All my life I’ve just laughed them off but in the last ten years, more and more of their theatricism and showmanship has pervaded the true English sport – football – and this last month has seen two examples that if they were ever to occur in the Premier League I would have to stop visiting pubs showing dodgy Arabian coverage and getting sly tickets from my mate at the Rovers.

This first example shows the kind of shit, unwarranted hype of every moment in a game that Sky do to a degree, but ITV are the worst culprits of. EVERY! moment has to BE! punctuated by SOMETHING! so exciting you can’t change CHANNEL! Witness this bunch of Yankee ponces getting flustered over a broken bit of glass.

Horrendous.

Next up we’ve got a piece of hooliganism that would have Brian Clough turning in his grave.

Who are these guys, the Lakers Casuals? They must meet in bars beforehand, sink two Buds and go cause a riot with ISO-friendly foam products. Pat Sharpe and the Fun House Crew would wipe the floor with this lot.

In a demented way all of this tiresome theatricism and exaggeration of the most mundane moments does make me yearn for the simpler times of casual violence, Bovril, jumpers for goalposts and muddy 3-2 battles on cold January afternoons. And that’s coming from a vegetarian whose sole combat experience of the last 20 years consists of clipping a camp youth around the ear. Joking aside, there’s a valid point; Americanising everything reduces it to a sanitised, family-friendly product void of any of the real-world excitement, danger, smells and sounds of the English version. We had something to be proud of but it’s completely gone at the top level – the atmosphere at even the best Premier League game today is totally stifled by the “family-friendly” ethos – and you need to drop down a few leagues to get a taste of what every ground used to be like. It’s a shame, but I’m sure it’s already too far down the line, too much money involved, to turn round from the American way.

america · basketball · football · ITV · Premier League · SKY