Television Review

"WHEN I GROW UP I'm gonna be Ronaldo the second - there's no doubt about that," a Liverpool scally remarked to no one in particular in one of last night's competing social documentaries. When they were children, the makers of last night's films must have had other heroes in mind; little Richard Alwyn, director of "Come on England" for Modern Times (BBC2) clearly wanted to be Ken Loach, while young Dominic Savage, director of "The Outsiders" for Cutting Edge (C4) had equally transparent aspirations to be Mike Leigh.

In Savage's case, this documentary was probationary. "Rogue Males", his last film for Cutting Edge, was properly criticised after it was revealed that some scenes were staged. "The Outsiders", his follow-up, probably seemed like a good idea when first commissioned; society's outcasts, living in a dole-hotel in Eastbourne, all set to a gloomy cello score. However, it was astonishing how little the programme managed to say, and it would have worked better as a two-minute Video Nation Short. This would have had a twofold effect; firstly there would be less of it to watch, secondly it might have focused the director's concentration. The overall effect was as if Mike Leigh had directed an episode of Sunset Beach with the cast of a Coen brothers film.

While Savage was Mike Leigh on a bad day - on a really bad day, in fact - Alwyn was Loach on fire. The first half of his film was almost perfect. Here was a talented director at the top of his game providing an intuitive snap-shot insight into two of life's most beguiling elements, football and childhood, as he followed an 11-year-old West Everton lad called Thomas and his mate, Paddy, during last summer's World Cup. How did he do it, one wondered. How did these boys arrive pure, intact and unaffected in our living rooms? Did Alwyn and his crew stay so incredibly still that his gang of pipsqueak scallywags forgot that he was watching? Or is he invisible? At times, I could have been watching a cheerier remake of Kes.

The film was less adept when it tried to be Raining Stones, and it had no need to introduce a dramatic device as explicit as a Holy Communion to make its point. Up to that point you could not see the narrative stitching, the cues and directions drifted in unobtrusively; from a television which happened to be on in the background or from the naturalistic chatter of its subjects. Loach, too, started as a documentary maker and Alwyn shares his talent for empathy and cinematography, as his previous work, The Shrine, also showed.

The scene in the pub was the funniest I've seen all week. Tom and his two tiny mates perched on a pub sofa in the afternoon watching England play Tunisia on the big screen. There they sat, pretending to be adults, telling mis-remembered jokes and watching the football. The scene rang with bell-clear dialogue and "performances" so natural that, as a pertinent saying goes, you couldn't make it up. This was the film's big idea, its core insight which made it a such as success; that football fans experienced the World Cup from a child's perspective.

In one of the many urban echoes of Kes, Tom's dad taught him to catch pigeons in the park. Tom's bird escaped his grasp; Alwyn didn't miss a trick.