sport
Sarah Kent
“Black people, since the beginning of time, have always made things cool. Jazz, rock ’n’ roll… pick anything from a cultural standpoint and we have always been the arbitrators of cool,” says sports journalist Jamele Hill. “And it was really no different with sneakers.”One Man and his Shoes is not about sneakers, though, so much as the clever marketing campaign that transformed a small American company specialising in running shoes into the global giant, Nike, and the dramatic impact this had on black youth in America.The star of the campaign was basketball super hero, Michael Jordan, except Read more ...
Owen Richards
In 2018, directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui burst onto the documentary scene with McQueen, a visually stunning study of British fashion designer Alexander McQueen. Acclaim and offers followed, but no-one could have predicted the subject of their second feature.Rising Phoenix is an expansive look at the Paralympics, its athletes, and the wider disability rights movement. Releasing on Netflix this week, the documentary covers the success of London 2012, the fiasco of Rio 2016, and the incredible stories behind the biggest names in para-sport. Owen Richards spoke with directors Bonhôte and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly famously commented that football is far more serious than a matter of life and death. This couldn’t quite be said of Harry Redknapp’s renewed adventures of footballers reunited (ITV), yet behind its jokey facade of a bunch of Nineties-era England veterans drinking their way across Europe, Harry’s Heroes is strangely poignant and delivers some painful emotional truths. The cameras follow Harry as he tries to prepare his squad for a re-match against their German counterparts (England beat them in last year’s first series), but the real story is the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 2020 Formula 1 season will commence in Melbourne next weekend... unless the race is cancelled because of the mounting coronavirus panic. Everyone will have to self-isolate and watch Netflix instead, so how fortunate that the ‘flix has delivered this second series of Drive to Survive in the nick of time.The first series last year was impressive, but this one seems to have taken a quantum leap upwards. Across the 10 episodes, it picks and probes at all the salient issues of F1, exploiting an amazing degree of backstage access and brilliant high-def action photography to reach back and forth Read more ...
Negar Esfandiary
Permission tells the story of Afrooz, the captain of Iran's National Futsal Team, who is stopped from joining her team at the Asia Cup Final because of the last minute whim of her estranged husband. It is based on Iranian football player Niloufar Ardalan, who in 2015 missed the Iran v Japan final of the Asia Games in Malaysia when her sports journalist husband Mahdi Toutounchi, enforced the right given to him by Islamic shar'ia law to prevent her from leaving the country.This second feature from director Soheil Beiraghi, described in his own Read more ...
Owen Richards
Whoever thought of crossing the social conscience of Pride with the sporting acumen of Dodgeball? Out of this unlikely union comes The Shiny Shrimps, a joyous dive into the world of gay water polo. Though it follows your typical obscure sports underdog story, the layered characters and unflinching topics make the Shrimps a surprise package.After making homophobic remarks to a gay reporter, the national swimming team is making an example of Matthias Le Goff. If he wants to go to the World Championships, he must pay penance by coaching a gay sporting team. His chosen charges are the titular Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Is there any challenge that television producers haven't filmed celebrities doing? They won't be happy until they've followed a bunch of them snowboarding down an Alp while baking a cake, conducting an orchestra and researching their family history. And if it involves a little sob followed by a group hug, bonus!But I can't be cynical about Sink or Swim (Channel 4) because it's in aid of the charity Strand Up to Cancer. The programme's USP is that 11 celebrities – using the term loosely – who are all weak or non-swimmers are being trained to do a sponsored relay swim across the Channel next Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Joanne McNally Assembly George Square ★★★★The area Joanne McNally treads (actually stomps might be a better word, given her fantastically high-energy performance) in The Prosecco Express is not new – she’s 36 and wondering if she should settle down and have children, or would that mean settling for less – but the Irish comic makes it her own.McNally tells us often filthy stories about her friends, married and single, with whom she drinks far too much Prosecco but whose lives give her food for thought. She a natural storyteller and there are some tall stories, but she knows how to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
With the vertiginous drama of England’s cricket World Cup victory still fresh, Barney Douglas’s documentary digs into the human cost of a previous ascent, when England’s Test team rose to No 1 in the early 2010s. Made in the dour image of coach Andy Flower, they seem ill-suited to Douglas’s intention of a “rock’n’roll” cricket film. But star batsman Kevin Pietersen’s mid-series meltdown, almost taking the team with him and rendering captain Andrew Strauss an insomniac before his final Test, is just the best-known crack-up. Media-trained interview omerta is forsaken, to reveal an odd, likeable Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
In cricket, timing is everything. Played a fraction early and that silky cover drive finds a batsman out to lunch as the ball cannons into his stumps. Too late and it dribbles uselessly to mid-off.Ex-cricketer turned journalist Vic Marks has made it his business to be in the right place at the right time. First as a mean spin bowler, sharing a Somerset dressing room with Botham, Richards, Roebuck and Garner, perhaps the most outrageously talented side in county cricket’s history. Then as a tidy presence in England’s one-day side of the 1980s, facing up to the West Indies and Australia. Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“How much does she owe us?” So ponder the now estranged parents of a former tennis pro, as they calculate the very literal investment they’ve put into their daughter. This probing new play from Oli Forsyth – well timed for Queen’s and Wimbledon – examines the consequences of achievement by proxy and a familial relationship that becomes transactional.Construction worker Ade (Jonathan Livingstone) and carer Nina (Phoebe Pryce, both pictured below) think tennis is “for other people”, but when their daughter excels at a free trial, they encourage her to pursue it – and a leisure activity Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Anthony Joshua’s shock defeat by the unfancied Andy Ruiz Jr suggests, heavyweight boxers ain’t what they used to be. Antoine Fuqua’s sprawling HBO documentary (this was the first of two parts) bangs the point home with its vivid examination of Muhammad Ali, the sport’s all-time greatest exponent, a fighter whose influence stretched way beyond sport into politics, religious faith and racial identity.The boxer formerly known as Cassius Clay was born in Louisville, Kentucky in January 1942. He changed his name after he’d defeated world champion Sonny Liston in 1964 and converted to Islam – Read more ...