Tony Bellew explores the rise and fall of football hooliganism…
Launching on BBC Sounds on Friday 7 March as a boxset, Gangster Presents: Hooligans delves deep into the rise and fall of hooliganism and the socioeconomic factors that led to its peak. It also explores the cultural impact it had on society, and how the police, Government and football clubs worked hard to put the fire out.
Presented by former world champion boxer, Tony Bellew, the series uncovers the turbulent history of the movement, from the fights to fashion, and its lasting impact on communities across the UK over the past six decades.
The podcast features not only members of the notorious ‘firms’ but also victims, the families of those lost to the violence, and undercover police officers who risked their lives infiltrating some of England’s most dangerous football gangs.
Packed with archive news material, conversations with well-known football legends and fans such as former footballer and broadcaster Pat Nevin, Radio DJ Trevor Nelson and TV presenter Nick Owen, and a soundtrack that takes you back to the era. Tony covers decades of football ‘firm’ history starting in the 60s up to present day.
Made forty years on from the tragic Heysel Stadium disaster, the podcast highlights a time when English football fans garnered a worldwide reputation for violence in and outside football grounds across Europe. So much so it became known as ‘the English disease.’
In other Beeb podcast news two brand new series will air this spring as part of the popular history strand, The History Podcast. Invisible Hands is a landmark six-part narrative podcast in which David Dimbleby tells the seismic story of the free market revolution – perhaps the most powerful political idea of the 20th century.
But this is not a dry story of economic models, this is the story of the little-known visionaries, mavericks and outcasts who made it their life’s work to transform Britain’s economy forever, setting the stage for Margaret Thatcher’s reforms, the City’s big bang and beyond. Dimbleby, who witnessed the idea unfold first-hand across his years as a BBC political reporter and presenter, takes us through the dramatic twists and turns of its evolution.
Following closely this May, Half-Life follows award-winning poet, novelist and journalist Joe Dunthorne as he embarks on a deeply personal investigation into his own family history. The gripping eight-part series starts with the story of his great-grandfather, Siegfried, a German-Jewish chemist who made radioactive toothpaste in the 1920s.
While trying to write his family’s history, Joe discovers Siegfried’s nearly two thousand page memoir, a turgid and repetitive account of his life that few members of his family ever managed to finish reading. Joe was going in search of the details of his family’s dramatic escape from Nazi Germany in 1936 but found a far more disturbing history, a confession from his great-grandfather hidden on page 1,692. This unearths a story of unexploded bombs, radioactive soil and erased histories that takes Joe from Berlin to Ankara to North Carolina and back to Swansea.
