TV: Putting the boot into hooligans

By Michele Hewitson


You have to hope that undercover investigative journalist Donal MacIntyre is lying under a palm tree somewhere tropical and foreign, sweating slightly under his false moustache, a long way from home. Because when MacIntyre Undercover: Football (tonight, 8.30pm, TV1) screened in Britain it put a bunch of football hooligans in a very bad mood.

MacIntyre has a taste for going on undercover forays into seamy worlds.

He's the guy who infiltrated the fashion scene, showed us lots of shots of MacIntyre loading secret cameras and told us what we already knew: that it's not very pretty out there if you happen to be a pretty young thing.

For Football, MacIntyre poses as a hardcore Chelsea football club fan so as to infiltrate a world where yobs rule and organised violence is regarded as a rite of passage.

He goes to extraordinary lengths to establish his cover - his only protection, he tells us, other than his hidden camera. He gets a Chelsea tattoo, and passes out during the process; the tattooist carries on.

He moves in next door to Jason, a hard-core Chelsea fan who lives in Chelsea Close in a house with the same street number as his favourite position on the football field.

Jason is also a hard-core hooligan and member of a far-right group who gets things started at matches by giving fascist salutes.

Jason's idea of how to have a good time on his holidays is for he and his mates to go on tours of European death camps.

They send postcards home: to well-known Jewish members of anti-fascist groups telling them what they've just done to their grandmother's graves.

Jason doesn't appear to have a job (although he, and the other hooligans, wear a uniform of designer streetgear).

He devotes all of his energy to attending matches; he has a particular passion for games abroad where he gets to bash foreign people. It takes some commitment.

Unlike other football fans Jason can't just buy a plane ticket. He's so well known to police that he never takes a direct route anywhere.

Danny, at 21, is already a "hardened hooligan," MacIntyre observes. He wants to be a Jason. "He sees the respect and fear they command and he wants a piece of the action."

Getting a piece of the action appears to revolve around organising "rumbles" by cellphone and holding court down the local pub with stories about smashing rival fans around the head with bits of iron.

The hooligans will go anywhere if there's the possibility of a fight. They don't go to Copenhagen to see the Little Mermaid: "We've come here to have a war."

Now they've got a new enemy to target. You really do have to hope that MacIntyre has got more protection than even the most convincing false moustache could hope to provide.