Lenin of the Rovers

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Lenin of the Rovers was a BBC Radio 4 comedy series from 1988 written by Marcus Berkmann and Harry Thompson, and starring Alexei Sayle as Ricky Lenin, a player for Felchester Rovers - Britain's only communist football team. Other players in the team included Stevie Stalin (Andrew McLean) and Terry Trotsky (Phil Cornwell). The team was managed by Des Frankly and Colonel Brace-Cartwright (Ballard Berkeley for Series 1 episodes 1 and 2, Donald Hewlett thereafter) who were frequently interviewed by Frank Lee Brian (real-life football commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme). Actors John Sessions and Jim Broadbent made character appearances in Series 2. The title is a parody of the long-running football-themed comic strip, Roy of the Rovers.

The show loosely parodied the increasing commercialisation of British football and the then-notorious violent loyalty of the fans. The script also made frequent use of Ricky Lenin's attempts to fit in with what he saw as a 'western' lifestyle, in a similar way to some of Sayle's appearances as the Balowski Family in The Young Ones. Situations included the trouble caused by the ghost-writing of Ricky's regular column in The Daily Tits (parodying The Sun) - a complicated argument in favour of collectivism in Lenin's original was transformed to "I hate all paddies, but I wouldn't mind giving that Gloria Hunniford one" in the paper; the North-South economic divide in England ("In Crunchthorpe there's a hundred and three per cent unemployment. The Government uses the place to dump nuclear waste! They pile it up in the town centre. Outside Freeman Hardy and Willis") and films The Titfield Thunderbolt and Apocalypse Now. A knowledge of football was useful but not essential. The script also took great delight in the violent nature of professional football at the time:

Northern pundit: "The average Crunchsider knows his football like the back of his hand. And what he really likes to see is really elegant, skilful one-touch players. Out in the middle of the park, screaming in agony, clutching their gonads."
Commentator: "So Crunchthorpe don't really go in for one-touch play, then?"
Northern pundit: "Oh, aye, they do. Provided the one touch is delivered just below the kneecaps like a steam hammer hitting an avocado..."

Another ongoing joke was various characters (particularly Sayle) speaking lines from pop songs as dramatic dialog. The fictional town of Felchester was itself presumably a joke: a reference to the relatively obscure practice of felching, conflating that term with Melchester, the fictional home of Roy of the Rovers.

[edit] 1st series 1988

  1. Up for the Coup
  2. Felcherama
  3. The Fifth Man
  4. Max Gut

[edit] 2nd series 1989

  1. Ghosts and Goolies
  2. The Felchester Firm
  3. Apocalypse Des
  4. The Final Solution

Series 2 was released as a double-cassette set in 1992.

[edit] External links

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