Jossy's Giants

JOSSY'S GIANTS
Made by: BBC
Shown on: BBC
Years shown: 1984-6

Theme tune: "Swapping their homework for footwork/Kicking the ball till its dark/Here go Jossy's Giants/Football's just a branch of science/Head the ball now, Jossy calls.../Jossy's Giants!!??/Dependable, reliant/Put your faith in Jossy's Giants/Get stuck in, we're gonna win.../Jossy's Giants!!"

The shouty opening titles by Mike Arnott had a bunch of disparate, yobbish-looking kids trying to spell out ‘Jossy’s Giants’ with placards, and getting the spelling wrong countless times. This was no Enid Blyton.

Geordie darts commentator Sid Waddell got the idea for this series from spending Saturday mornings watching his son’s football team, The Churwell Lions, get repeatedly beaten by rival teams (The Churwell Lions later appeared in the series as themselves, a rival team to the stars.) Taking up his pen, he created the Glipton Grasshoppers, a useless bunch of pre-teen reprobates who acquire as a new manager, Joswell ‘Jossy’ Blair (Jim Barclay), a former brilliant child star, who received a career-wrecking injury on his full debut for Newcastle United. He took it upon himself to straighten the boys out, show them what real training and commitment was all about, and forced them to wear a black and white strip. The kids were a walk-over compared to Councillor Glenda Fletcher (Jenny McCracken), who always had some opposition to Jossy’s plans; the two revelled in their arguments with each other which, of course, meant they fancied each other rotten.

The makers of Jossy’s Giants were of the Byker Grove school of casting, and selected boys from local schools and youth clubs who could play football, believing it was easier to teach them to act rather than teach drama-school kids how to be ruffian footballers. One of the show’s stars was Mark Gillard, who played cheeky striker, Ross Nelson, and who - at the age of six - I had quite a crush on. But if the kids’ acting was suspect, they knew how to make them look good…by securing England skipper Bryan Robson, as a guest star.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 8/10

(Thanks to the BBC's comedy website for the borrowed pic)