Review of Alistair McGowan´s Football Backchat: Best Of

Introduction

Alistair McGowan has been around for a long while, mainly doing impressions on the stand up comedy circuit, but he also played Spock in the excellent BBC comedy/drama All Quiet on the Preston Front. He`s also had a recent BBC series called Alistair McGowan`s Big Impression.

The material on this disc is basically a compilation of some material previously only released on VHS, and features a mixture of studio recorded impressions of various footballers, commentators and pundits, combined with real footage of various stars with impressions dubbed over the top of them. A lot of the footage is related to the 1998 World Cup, which does date some of the jokes, and if you`re not a massive football fan some of them will just sail over your head.

Video

A standard 1.33:1 full-frame transfer, which is probably how it was shot as this was originally produced for VHS. It looks fine and there are no faults with it, but as it`s just a mixture of studio shots and news type footage, there`s nothing else to say about it.

Audio

A DD2.0 stereo soundtrack, which is all that`s required. Everything is clear and audible, apart from those impressions that are intentionally difficult to understand!

As there`s not much else to say about the soundtrack, I`ll comment briefly on the quality of some of the impressions. If you`re not a huge football fan, you might not realise how good some of them are, or in a few cases, how bad.

I think my favourite has to be Martin O`Neill, now manager of Celtic. McGowan plays him as very slightly mentally unbalanced, always contradicting himself, even in the same sentence, and that`s quite an accurate representation if you remember watching him during World Cup 1998.

Features

The only extra feature here are some extra clips which aren`t in the main feature. Why? Who knows, but if you want to see them you have to watch them separately.

Conclusion

Given the age of the material and some of the jokes, the appeal of this DVD is rather limited. Given the fact that the material has also been released on VHS and the DVD doesn`t really offer anything other than slightly better picture and sound, then the appeal is even more limited.

Big fans of football will enjoy what`s on here, but more casual fans will miss a lot of the jokes. The whole DVD is really just an extended version of the round on Whose Line is it Anyway? where the contestants provide new voices for a video clip.

Most of the impressions are spot on, but there are a few that are rather dodgy. And I think that the chances that you`ll watch this over and over again are rather low. The quality of the DVD is fine, I`m just not sure why you`d buy it over the VHS equivalent, and given its very limited appeal and dated material, why you might want it at all.