Football isn't what you'd easily call a laughing matter in Scotland.
So it's probably just as well this latest cunningly droll escapade from Ridiculusmus is a squinty-eyed look at how what happens on the pitch can be used to explore what TeamGB (and the national identity it bends into a brand) amounts to off the field.
David Woods and Jon Haynes – still the acting core of TeamRidiculusmus – devised and wrote this two-hander under the influence of the 2010 World Cup and the early days run-up to London's 2012 Olympics. In the main, they play a couple of dark-suited civil servants charged with creating a football team capable of winning gold at the Olympics. It's tempting to say "don't laugh" but that's exactly what you do as Roger (Woods) blind sides his chosen fall guy, Brian (Haynes), with fatuous politico-guff on the feelgood factor of winning, archly speckled through with footie terms and the aura of superiority that allows one self-serving mediocrity to chivvy a lower-ranking bureaucrat into a task he knows nothing about. The hapless Brian is clueless about football. It's doubtful if he knows much about the rough and tumble of life outside his own fastidiously narrow experiences – otherwise why quiz Miggy (Woods, as the Algerian cleaner applying for British citizenship) about British values?
If there's a lot of sharply pointed humour twisted into this scenario, there are deeper issues lurking to ambush your assumptions about identity, be it national or personal, genetic or (like Miggy) acquired. Footballing quiddities are the least of it here. Instead there is a fast-paced, wickedly astute comedy of mind games that show TeamGB forever scoring own goals.
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