ONE DOC A DAY CHALLENGE: Day Three - Six Nations: Full Contact (Netflix, 2024)
If there’s one area of unscripted tv having a growth spurt at the moment, it’s sports documentaries - and it’s Box To Box Films who’ve been smashing them out most prolifically.
Sports can be pretty niche so when a series like Drive to Survive manages to transcend the traditional audience of Formula One and make it exciting to someone like me - whose interest in F1 never extended beyond a brief dalliance in 1996, because Damon Hill was winning* - they’re going to try and repeat the formula.
Six Nations: Full Contact was a good test case for me, because I hate rugby. I grew up in a part of South East England where there were more private schools per square mile than sweetshops, and as a football-mad state school tomboy who’d wear a full Leeds United strip down the high street I grew up somewhat prejudiced against the sport.
Full Contact’s pre-title promised the lot: fever-pitched combat where one mistake could cost everything, vicious rivalries playing out between battle-hardened warriors willing to die for the cause - the stakes couldn’t be higher.
But then it’s just… rugby. The game where as soon as anything exciting starts to happen it stops for ten minutes while big burly men with bleeding ears pile on top of each other as they try to fish the silly-shaped ball out from under themselves and inch it forwards another negligible distance until it’s deemed to have crossed the line. For me, no amount of dramatic music underpinning any of this could make it feel dramatic.
More interesting were the characters involved, and I appreciated how they picked those with some kind of nuance or backstory: clearly they targeted anyone who deviated from the usual type and tried to make the best of them - eg the Bristol lad who could have chosen a life of crime but instead chose a life of rugby. A familiar story perhaps, but at least it challenged my prejudices a little.
I guess what made Drive to Survive so appealing was first the novelty of it, and then the glamour, but ultimately it was so much easier to be invested in the individual personalities and their highs and lows: the full spectrum of the human condition was on show and was intrinsic to the racing. Even the title more successfully signposts the fact that this is actually quite exciting stuff, and the constantly escalating wail of the revving engines, so reminiscent (and triggering) of distant Sunday afternoons competing with Blur in your bedroom, become almost part of the fun. Full Contact, by comparison, feels perfunctory. However I’ve no doubt rugby fans will find a lot to enjoy.
So, sport documentaries: too much, too soon? It’s definitely becoming a crowded field. I probably won’t be trying the one about golf anytime ever.
*apart from the weird crush I had on Nigel Mansell when I was about six
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3moExactly... The tournament has fallen off as compared to Euros!