Wednesday 6 July 2022 02:03 AM CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV: Dear BBC snobs trends now
Freddie Flintoff’s Field Of Dreams (BBC1)
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Storyville: On The Morning You Wake (To The End Of The World) (BBC4)
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Cricket is boring, a group of disaffected boys in Lancashire told former England captain and local lad Freddie Flintoff.
It’s slow and elitist — and anyone can see that football is ten times better.
They’ve got a point, despite England’s heroics against India at Edgbaston yesterday. And in the course of a slow, boring hour, Freddie Flintoff’s Field Of Dreams (BBC1) inadvertently proved it.
The show was rooted in snobbery. Though Freddie himself went to a state school in Preston, two-thirds of the last England men’s Ashes team were privately educated. Some of the BBC’s Oxbridge socialists have got wind of this, and set out to demonstrate that even ‘common’ boys can play cricket if given the chance.
Freddie Flintoff went to a state school in Preston but two-thirds of the last England men’s Ashes team were privately educated
The trouble is, the common boys didn’t much want to. They saw straight through the condescending premise and bristled at being labelled ‘underprivileged’.
BBC producers, of course, assume any working-class male with a northern accent must be disadvantaged. But one of the lads, 17-year-old Hemi, chatted to cameras in his bedroom with a widescreen TV and games console on one side, and a top-of-the-range electric piano on the other.
If that’s poverty, I quite fancy it.
Another chap, 15-year-old Sean, came closer to the stereotype, boasting that every Friday night he and his mates went out for a drink — ‘in the park, vodka’.
But Sean was a
