Fantasy Football League

            

This probably came to its zenith with Euro 96. By this point, England had a football team and a manager that people generally liked, the Premiership had exciting foreign talent but still enough relatable English players of the old skool and attending a match was not the physically hazardous business it had been in the 1980s.While we were told at the time that there was a revival of lad culture, many of us couldn't quite see how the new lad culture was any different from old lad culture, centred as it was and still is around drinking, women and sport. FFL was, at the time, seen as an expression of this; an off-shoot of the Loaded generation but the one thing that strikes us as we re-watch it now is just how un-laddish it really is. It's more nerdy and childish than alpha male and happily so The era of the Baby Bentley/Spit-Roasting 19-year-old multimillionaire sociopath footballer of today's popular imagination had not yet begun, and while football was slickly and successfully whoring itself to sell any product you like, it hadn't yet achieved the all-pervasive corporate cynicism of the ensuing couple of decades.Like a lot of successful TV shows, we reckon that the slightly shambolic, studenty vibe of FFL made it look a hell of a lot easier than it actually was, and that's testament to the excellence of David Baddiel and, especially, Frank Skinner. The WBA fan occupies a unique place for us in managing to be genuinely funny, filthy and somewhat risk-taking while occupying the same comic mainstream as the likes of Michael McIntyre and John Bishop. It took two very talented comedians to create FFL, which may be why, in the intervening years, so few other examples of funny football programmes have emerged.Rather like the biggest band of the mid-1990s, Oasis, FFL had a swagger and a rough-and-ready around the edges charm that hid an intuitive intelligence. The format had initially been based on the idea of fantasy football, getting celebrities to talk about their teams and picks, but later evolved into a chaotic but often successful chat show and sketch show.