BRITPOP CINEMA PWOPA NAWTY!
Tommy Johnson (Danny Dyer): What else are you gonna do on a Saturday? Sit in your fuckin’ armchair wankin’ off to Pop Idols? Then try and avoid your wife’s gaze as you struggle to come to terms with your sexless marriage? Then go and spunk your wages on kebabs, fruit machines and brasses? Fuck that for a laugh! I know what I’d rather do. Tottenham away, love it! – The Football Factory.
Selhurst Park football ground, January 25, 1995, Crystal Palace vs Manchester United, nearly 50 minutes gone.
After lashing out at an overzealous marker, United’s short-fused star player Eric Cantona is sent off. Collar upturned, he peacocks off to the dugout in disgust. From the stands, Palace fan Matthew Simmons casts aspersions on the virtue of Cantona’s mother – on balance, a mistake. Before anyone can stop him, the footballer launches himself at Simmons with an explosive, if inexpert, kung-fu kick; 200 pounds of livid Frenchman landing hard, then punching harder.
It is the most famous common assault in English legal history. Not that it affects the game’s premier thug-philosopher, who walks off the pitch and onto the silver screen.
During the 1990s, football fandom became a growth industry. Once a large – and largely working-class – subculture, it boomed with the economy and the rise of the New Lad.
The 1990 World Cup saw two extraordinary occurrences: a semi-final place for England, who – rather less extraordinarily – lost to West Germany on penalties, and a half-decent football song in the form of World in Motion by New Order, co-written with the ever-present Keith Allen. In 1992 came the Premier League, and with it millions of pounds in sponsorship and satellite television rights, not to mention Nick Hornby’s memoir Fever Pitch, an ode to obsessive supporters.
As Britpop chronicler, “In Hornby’s wake it was no longer sufficient in public life simply to enjoy football as a sport; a tribalism had also to be adopted, or feigned, if one wished to hold one’s own in polite society.”
