Beyond the Touchline

On the eve of real football returning, we sneak in our look back at some fictional football we spent some of the intervening period watching: the classic Nickelodeon sitcom Renford Rejects. Just one small snag: it turns out it wasn't actually very good. Join us as we thoroughly slaughter one of the sacred cows of the generation slightly after our own - but can we get Dave to find one good thing he liked about it?

In these trying times, it’s no surprise we’re all retreating into the comfort of nostalgia. So for our latest episode, Dave, Seb and Denis have picked out an assortment of our favourite football-related things – from videos to books to games and beyond – that might serve as a welcome distraction and provide a little bit of much-needed joy.

Dave and Seb return - minus an absent-at-the-last-minute Denis - to tackle When Saturday Comes, a 1990s football film that some people remember quite fondly. Spoilers: we aren't among them. We discuss Sean "Y'Bastard!" Bean, terrible Oirish accents, unrealistic-looking Premier League players, stereotypical depictions of Sheffield, and... Highlander?

We're rounding off the temporary break in our planned programming with something a little bit different from the norm (unless you're used to listening to Dave's podcasts) - it's a pub quiz! Dave has set five rounds of fiendish questions about football, footballers and a lot more besides for Seb and Denis to face off against each other and tackle. And if you're keen for us to get back to the sort of thing we started this podcast to do, don't worry: we'll be back on schedule with regular-length, deep-diving episodes on football culture very soon!

Dave and Seb are back with a shorter-than-usual episode, filling a gap while we wait for Denis to return from a temporary absence and get back to doing full-length ones. But we've still got a cracker of a subject to talk about - the classic Viz comic strip Billy the Fish, and its bizarre, Harry Enfield-voiced 1990 Channel 4 cartoon iteration. It's something that a lot of people have fond memories of, but how does it hold up these days...?

On the latest episode of Beyond the Touchline, Seb, Dave and Denis play four-four-f**king-two as we look back at Steve Barron's 2001 film Mike Bassett: England Manager. Poorly marketed and lukewarmly received, how does the film hold up these days? We explore the veracity of the football world it creates, its satire of an entire generation of English football, the debt it owes to documentaries like The Impossible Job, and just how good we actually find it on a pure comedy level.

In May 1994, BBC2 devoted an entire evening of programming to the newly-growing cultural phenomenon of modern football - with newly-made documentaries, archive-dredging clips, and classic episodes blended together. To say this was Right Up The Street of all three members of this podcast team in their wide-eyed youth is something of an understatement - so, 25 years on, Dave, Denis and Seb have rewatched the entire thing and spent a solid couple of hours talking about it.

Welcome to Beyond the Touchline, a new podcast about football culture! In this debut episode, football writers David Hartrick, Seb Patrick and Denis Hurley look at David Peace's 2006 novel The Damned Utd, along with Tom Hooper's 2009 movie adaptation The Damned United. How do book and film stack up against each other, as well as in the wider annals of football-based storytelling. Are they fair to Clough, Leeds, both, or neither?