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BRISTOL CITY CENTENARY VIDEO REVIEW - March 1997

There's a great moment about halfway through this video celebrating Bristol City's centenary year as an amusing piece of Cockney rhyming slang. Narrator Tony Robinson has just related the tale of City's most recent spell in the old First Division, back in the late 70s. During this time, the club achieved its highest ever league placing, a dizzying 13th. A couple of years later, however, the club was relegated. "The glory years", intones Tone with no visible trace of irony, "were over."

That apart, the video suffers from the obvious flaw, namely that nothing interesting or remarkable has ever happened to Bristol City, unless you count going bust once (which, as far as I can tell, has happened to about 70% of English league teams in the last decade or so). The story, then, is one of Freight Rover Trophy runs, occasional 1-0 wins over Liverpool and Arsenal, and the gradual and steady decline which means Bristol is now the biggest city in the whole of Britain with no top-flight football played in it.

Within these hefty constraints, the producers have done a pretty decent job, with a few nice visual quirks and a quite entertaining club song whose chorus ends with the stark conclusion "We'll support them till we're dead", but as stories go, Bristol City's is the equivalent of Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible - untidy, badly-paced, plotless and ultimately bereft of any point. (And without the great stunts). It's difficult to see what the heck all those hooligans find to get so excited about.

VERDICT: Hey look, it's the Goodyear blimp!

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