Watching…The View from the Terrace
When I was twelve, I used to go door-to-door selling tickets for my local First Division football team’s charity lottery. This wasn’t like selling Avon for £3.50 commission. The spoils were much greater than that. Sell enough and you’d get a free season ticket. That season ticket was your golden ticket into the First Division League games, Cup games, Unders games, and bounce matches. Every other Saturday, with my free pass safely secured, I’d go with my dad to take in the spectacle.
There was nothing about the experience that wasn’t intoxicating. Flashing your season to the auld boy manning the ticket hatch, you’d push your way through the turnstile and walk straight into the hyper-masculine realm of the terrace and face-first into sensory overload. The abrasive floodlights. The waft of burnt onions and Bovril. The incessant tannoying of a mouth too close to the microphone. The volleys of verbal tirades or – worse – the sound of a crowded terrace mortified into silence at three-nil down. Most of all I’d loved the language of football. There was the jargon of it, for one. And the cod-analysis of it, for another. Then there were the mixed metaphors. The nonsensical anthems. The angry expletives. The earnest apologies from the fella next to you who’d taken it one fuck too far in front of a wean.
Who cares if I could never feel my feet by Half Time? I was revelling in the bathos of it all.
I haven’t been to a home game since I was thirteen (or maybe fourteen) and I didn’t realise just how wistfully nostalgic I was for the fitba until I found myself utterly engrossed in an episode of BBC Scotland’s The View from the Terrace. For those who haven’t watched the show, here is the TLDR summary: The View from the Terrace began life as a student start-up podcast in 2007. When the BBC Scotland channel launched in February 2019, TVFTT launched on the channel in the same week. The show is hosted by Craig Telfer, who is joined by the show’s regular panel members (Craig Fowler, Shaughan McGuigan, Joel Sked, and Robert Borthwick). Currently in its third series, TVFTT takes an irreverent look at Scottish football and more interestingly the culture that surrounds it.
There are so many features of this programme worthy of study in the classroom. Although the show’s nucleus is panel-based discussion, the programme also includes observational documentaries, light-hearted pastiches, short films and spoken word. With Mercury Prize-winning Edinburgh band Young Fathers providing the theme tune for Series One, and Series Two and Three adopting ‘The Late 90’s’ by Ella’s Brother, music is also integral to the show’s aesthetics. There are currently only four episodes available on Iplayer (if you’re reading, BBC Scotland, it would be lovely to have more) but more episodes of The Terrace podcast are available on Spotify.
So how to use this text in the classroom?
If you have a BGE Level Three class…
Use The View from the Terrace to teach key spoken language skills (debating, reasoning, mediating, hosting etc.). Give pupils a topic currently affecting Scottish Football (particularly the lower divisions or Junior leagues) and ask them to research the topic before undertaking a panel-based discussion on it. This could form the basis of a good discursive essay in BGE. For inspiration, watch the 5-minute film ‘Big fish wee pond – Auchinleck Talbot are Junior football giants’, that appeared on TVFTT in October 2019 (available on the show’s page on BBC Scotland website).
If you have a level Four class…
Use either The Terrace podcast or The View from the Terrace as a text for analysing spoken language. A good exercise at this level would be to analyse how humour is created. Pupils might script their own fifteen-minute podcast on any aspect of Scottish sport more generally.
If you (like me) always have football or rugby-daft seniors…
Use this programme to explore sports journalism and broadcast media. Pair it up with extracts from Scottish Football periodical, Nutmeg.
Journalistic skills might be developed for Senior Phase pupils looking to write a sports-based Folio.