The Rugby World Cup is on, so it is natural for telly to look back to 2003, when England won the trophy. What sort of light-factual series would be a good commemoration? Fortunately, a relevant bandwagon is already rolling.
Recently, Andrew Flintoff has taught underprivileged kids cricket on the BBC, and David Beckham has rescued a youth football team for Disney. So here comes Grand Slammers on ITV1, a two-parter in which a gang of World Cup winners teach rugby to prison inmates. An easy commission – but ITV may not have ended up with quite the show it expected.
Lawrence Dallaglio, Mike Tindall and Martin Johnson are first through security at the Mount, a category C clink in Hertfordshire. Immediately, rugby lads’ legendarily top-drawer banter is in evidence, as Johnson observes that Dallaglio and Tindall, bald-headed and granite-featured, could pass as prisoners. Much of the opening episode’s endless badinage focuses on the idea that these retired pros are a gang of reprobates who could easily be in prison themselves.
Tindall’s marriage to Zara Phillips and consequent ascent into the royal family has, meanwhile, not stopped him cracking gags. When one of the guards says the reluctant prisoners will have to be given “a little bit of love”, King Charles’s niece’s husband spots an opportunity for giggles. “Not prison love!” he quips – a reference to the high frequency of rapes in jail.
In between all the joshing, the familiar beats of the inspirational sports documentary are faithfully hit. A match against the prison officers is arranged, but the task of raising a team initially seems impossible. Several lags tell Johnson to do one when he tours a wing looking for converts, and when some are tempted out on to the grass, a troubling montage suggests the volunteers are well below the national average at running and catching. Another worrying scene, featuring Johnson and Jason Robinson scribbling haplessly on a flip chart, suggests these world champions are below average at explaining the rules of rugby.
What about the prisoners themselves? Almost all of them are in prison for drug offences. One felt his depression and anxiety would prevent him from ever holding down a job; another grew up in care and spiralled after his ex-partner’s suicide; another was the only English speaker in a family of Albanian immigrants, under pressure to be a high earner at a young age; another had no idea what to do when he left the navy.
Perhaps because access to these men was limited, we only hear their stories briefly. The programme is much more exercised by meeting members of the 2003 squad, introducing them gradually so we can see how each one approaches the task of engaging the group. Phil Vickery teaches scrummaging and says hard work is the way out of adversity. Jonny Wilkinson gives a hippyish, oddly beautiful speech about sending the ball a message from your heart, to tell it that it will go over the posts when you kick it. Ben Cohen is an excellent coach, sharp and energetic, but has zero tolerance for the prisoners mucking about, furiously cutting them down with a crack about his time being more precious than theirs.
As training continues, a murmuring tension persists between Dallaglio, who runs a charity that uses rugby to help kids at risk of ending up in prison, and some of the other players, who seem to agree with Cohen that jail must not be “a holiday”. Cohen’s limited patience is, however, explained by his own story – a life blighted by a crime for which the perpetrators were too lightly punished.
This turns out to be more compelling than any narrative the programme-makers extract from the inmates. So far, the show isn’t about them, it’s about the rugby pros, who have another issue that goes deeper than mild political disagreement. As the episode goes on, it slowly becomes noticeable that whenever a new member of the squad arrives – Matt Dawson and Will Greenwood also turn up – they are greeted as long-lost friends, strangers almost.
On the eve of the match against the prisoners, more than half a team’s worth of 2003 veterans gather to drink pints of lager in a leafy beer garden. A sadness hangs in the air as Cohen marvels at 20 years having flashed past – these blokes, with their bent noses and distended ears, haven’t maintained a bond with the only other people who know what their life-defining experience felt like. Let’s hope they can sort that out in episode two: Grand Slammers is a show about rugby helping men with their problems, and that’s not just the prisoners.
• Grand Slammers aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX now
