The Golden Vision, something better you can do

Everton fans are lucky to have in their repertoire one of BBC television's Wednesday Plays, made in 1968 by Tony Garnett and Ken Loach, the producer-director combo who upended television drama two years earlier with Cathy Come Home and its raw depiction of homelessness. In The Golden Vision Everton is the muse, but to an extent that was circumstance — Garnett was a fanatical Aston Villa supporter wishing he was making this in Birmingham, but the writer, Neville Smith, was all Everton. The subject of the drama was football fans, with documentary contributions from football players, the blurring, duelling realisms a hallmark of Garnett and Loach's approach.

The fans' parts are all acted, but authentically, and part-improvised, by a cast of amateurs recruited from Liverpool's social clubs by producers who went to see local talent shows. Attention to realism was how you could get someone mumbling "gobshite" on 1968's BBC. One moment stands out from modern fandom: Everton fans in the back of a removal lorry going down to London, singing of Liverpool's Ian St John and Everton's Alex Young: 'St John's body lies a moulding in the grave, as Alex Young goes marching on'. You don't tend to get many songs about one centre-forward triumphing over the death of another these days, but maybe if we bring the folk hymns back that will bring back the gore.

Not everyone thought the blurring realism made for a believable play. The TV critic of the Reading Evening Post thought the stories were too 'hard to accept' as true to life, because surely not even the most ardent football fan would go to a match and leave his wife in labour. He thought presenting these fantastical episodes so realistically that they looked like documentary was very unfair on football fans. A reader wrote to the letters page next week to help him out, saying he'd anticipated, 'the clicking of switches as bewildered southerners changed channels ... I also was a little puzzled, but only by the excellence of the acting ... It was not just fiction, it was, believe me, Liverpool.'

The most touching of the criss-crossing domestic storylines is about an elderly fan who nobody believes when he talks down the pub about Alex Young scoring Everton's winner in the 1906 FA Cup final, because they're assuming the old boy is getting mixed up with their 1960s hero of the same name. One young schoolkid believes him, though, and goes to visit daily, making him cups of tea, listening to stories of life as a merchant seaman, and passing trivia tests on Everton teams of the 1920s. Here's a brilliant bit of the script: "Twenty-first of April nineteen-hundred-and-six it was," the old man tells him. "That was the year of the big San Francisco earthquake. A terrible disaster, that. But it was a disaster for Newcastle that day as well when we beat 'em one-nothing."

The idea is to get across to unenlightened viewers in Reading what it means to be 'football soft', as one of the despairing female characters calls her husband. There's a clear gender line, the women in the play a condemning chorus against their Everton obsessed husbands, sons, sons-in-law and their mates. Obsessed, as a word, doesn't adequately express the way football dominates their lives, so we need stories to do the work.

In just over an hour football goes up against birth, a new father shambling to his young wife's bedside the day after an away trip to Arsenal, pointing at the crib and asking, "Is that 'im?", and wins. It goes up against marriage, a best man coming out blurred in every photo as he rushes to make the second half at Goodison Park, and wins. It goes up against sex, the fans talking football through a Soho striptease after that trip to Highbury, and wins. It goes up against work, fans begging for early release from drudge so they can get to the match, and wins. It goes up against death, a hearse giving an Evertonian his final trip around Goodison Park while a game goes on inside, and wins. Eventually a priest shows up in the front room, wanting to know if football on Saturdays is keeping the men away from Sunday morning mass, and going up against religion, football wins. Birth, marriage, sex, work, death, religion and salvation in the hereafter. Football has beaten down and replaced them all.