United Review

• 18th Aug 2011

This interpretation of the 1958 Munich air crash that claimed eight members of Manchester United’s team was not without its critics. Sir Matt Busby’s son claimed that the BBC’s drama United had made his father look more like a gangster than a football manager, and survivor Harry Gregg complained that the film “makes us look like a pub team. To me that is a terrible insult to the great footballers of that generation.”

However, this is not a documentary – it’s a drama. In dramas, events are conflated, their actual sequence rearranged for effect or they are omitted altogether. More often than not, dramatisations of real events will depict things that never actually happened and people who never existed.

I knew almost nothing about the ‘Busby Babes’ but I do understand the rules around dramatisations of real events, so I had adjusted my expectations accordingly. Whichever way you tear it, United nails grief in a peculiarly understated, English way.

David Tennant manages to stack a few years on by virtue of dressing old and chain smoking, and Dougray Scott as Matt Busby exudes gruff paternalism. If Harry Gregg was upset by the depiction of his team as a ‘pub’ team, it certainly wasn’t done to belittle them. The world of professional football in 1958 was quite different from what it is today: these guys are depicted as a close-knit community, attending the same dinner dances, the same pubs and the same movies. They earn chips and smoke at half time.

In all honesty, I probably know as much now about the Busby Babes as I did before I watched United, and it’s possible that what I think I learnt from this in terms of who was who and who did what is flat out wrong. But this was a gripping and involving hour and a half, the kind of uncynical yank on the heart strings that comes along too rarely. As Tennant’s version of coach Jimmy Murphy would say, “Well done, lads.”

Clare Moody