‘It’s a national disgrace…’
In 1997, the BBC aired The Fix, a 90-minute TV drama written and directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Steve Coogan, Jason Isaacs and Ricky Tomlinson. These are household names now, but this was before Greengrass had directed the Bourne Trilogy, before Coogan started winning awards for his acting and before Jason Isaacs became a Hollywood mainstay. I watched The Fix when it first aired and was so moved by it that the final coda left me in tears. I should add that I was 10 years old at the time, but still, the fact remains. Revisiting Greengrass’ film almost thirty (!) years later confirmed that I was perhaps an overly emotional child…
The British betting scandal of 1964 saw ten professional football players banned for life from the beautiful game and jailed. The Fix focuses on arguably the two most high-profile players involved, Tony Kay (Jason Isaacs), David Layne (Chris Walker) and the journalist who caught them (Mike Gabbert as portrayed by Coogan).
The reason I found The Fix so moving as a ten-year-old is that for me, the thought of being a professional footballer was the only thing that entered my head. So, to see these men, some of whom never actually ‘threw’ a game but did place a bet on fixtures they were directly involved in, banned from the sport they loved, felt like an injustice. Watching it again as a cynical adult, I found those involved less easy to sympathise with, although it should be said that footballers were not well paid in the 1960s and they nearly always had very short careers. Perhaps the biggest tragedy is that some of the players were involved in the England set-up and could possibly have been part of the ’66 World Cup winning squad had their careers progressed as expected.
Elsewhere, it’s interesting to see Coogan at such a nascent stage of his acting career. His performance here is interesting, but it’s also a caricature of an ambitious newsman rather than a lived-in character. Isaacs fares better, delivering an authentic South Yorkshire accent (as someone from the area, I can confirm this is a rarity), and Walker is always a welcome onscreen presence. I also enjoyed Dominic Muldowney’s orchestral score, which adds some gravitas to what could have felt like a fairly low-stakes story.
The Fix is tough to find (I had to watch a decidedly low-quality stream of it on a YouTube knock-off), but as football films go, it’s one of the most intelligent and also one of the least seen. Well worth seeking out.
