Television: Briefly worshipped and quickly forgotten

The advent of the forthcoming World Cup has unleashed such rose-tinted nostalgic television histories of soccer that one... might even be tempted to believe that it was once “the beautiful game”. Unfortunately, it was always a hard-nosed business where players were never more than slabs of meat to be briefly worshipped and quickly forgotten. Manchester United may have built an industry around remembering the players killed in the Munich disaster, but they gave short shift to the players injured in that crash who were let go with little sympathy and less cash. The late Bill Shankly might have religiously popped his head into the away dressing room before Liverpool home fixtures to welcome teams at Anfield, but he religiously did so 20 minutes before kick off when he knew that players would not yet have their socks on and he could discreetly check if any player had a bandaged ankle so that he could order his own players to kick it hard.

All in the Game (Channel 4, Thursday, 9pm) was a once-off soccer drama so un-rose-tinted that it would almost persuade you to make your sons take up lacrosse. Scripted by Tony Grounds, it was directed by the fast-rising Irish television director Jim O'Hanlon, best known in Ireland for his play The Buddhist of Castleknock. O'Hanlon first made a name for himself on British television when he earned the gratitude of all nations who share these islands by being instrumental in putting Deirdre Rachid in jail on Coronation Street. Sadly, she was released, but his directing credits since then include the Emmy Award-winning Waking the Dead, and several episodes of Paul Abbott's Shameless, containing sexual positions which have yet to reach Weatherfield. All in the Game starred Ray Winstone as a football manager torn between loyalty to his club, languishing in what might be termed the Sunderland position in the Premiership, and to his son, a crooked agent who is creaming money in transfer fees. It was a drama as much as money as about sport, teasing out the corrupt grey areas in the underbelly of the beautiful game.

This week on RTÉ was a tale of two decades, the 1960s and the 1980s. Unfortunately an advance tape of Peter Lennon's famous Rocky Road to Dublin (RTÉ1, Tuesday, 10.15pm) didn't reach me in time for my deadline, but it is amazing that this controversial 1968 study of Irish society is only being shown now. The 1980s were explored in At Last – the 1980s Theme Night (RTÉ2, Saturday, 9pm), a mixed day devoted to an era when an international tours for Irish bands involved playing Irish clubs in Cricklewood. We had sex amid the Wicklow hills with a young, tongue-tied Miley Byrne, European success with Johnny Logan, a reminder that the Undertones were far more than a one-hit wonder and an utterly ludicrous over the top sketch from Halls Pictorial Weekly involving Councillors from Ballymagash angrily (to the point of blows) debating an emergency motion that Ireland should boycott the Moscow Olympics to show the Russians that Ballymagash was not taking its invasion of Afghanistan lying down. The terrifying thing – in case anyone got too nostalgic – was that the Halls Pictorial Weekly sketch turned out to be an absolutely verbatim re-enactment of a contemporary meeting of Offaly County Council.

Frank Hall's tradition of reviewing the regional newspapers on television hasn't gone away, you know – it lives on in the bilingual Seachtain: The Week (RTÉ1, Sunday) which took a behind-the-scenes look at the nine amateur theatre companies competing at the RTÉ All Ireland Amateur Drama Festival in Athlone. The overall winners, Kilmeen Drama Group, along with the other companies like Silken Thomas Players, the Lifford Players and Newpoint deserved this exposure for the sheer (and utterly neglected) excellence of what they do. It's odd how if two actors call themselves semi-professional, they can get national newspaper critics to turn up to a room over a pub for a 20-minute experimental piece which attracted an audience of six, whereas both radio dramas and top amateur drama companies like Corn Mill Theatre Company from Leitrim (who reached Athlone with an original play, Dig, by Seamus O'Rourke) receive scant attention. Kilmeen won with A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant, but companies seeking something both original and surreal might do well to dig through the old minutes of Offaly County Council.

Dermot Bolger's new novel, The Family on Paradise Pier, is about to be published in softback, with an illustrated extended afterword