The Cup (BBC Two)

The prospects for The Cup do not look good: before the first episode the critics’ knives were heartily slashing away at its past-it mockumentary style. Is it that bad? OK, it’s not The Office (and really, the mockumentary should have died back then, in a blaze of rousing, nation-conquering glory). But The Cup has its charm. It is set, as all these things about salt-of-the-earth types are, in the North where people have common sense and are down to earth, away from us flibbertigibbets with feta cheese and soulless apartments in the South.

It has a neat central thread: Ashburn FC are a young person’s football team (person’s because its most prominent female member, Ali, is a foul-mouthed little girl whose every abusive sentence is bleeped). The real drama happens on the touchlines between competitive parents. Terry, played by Steve Edge, is a frustrated could-have been, desperately living through his son Malky. Malky dutifully kicks a ball around, but in a brilliant scene was shown happiest at the stove cooking “mostly Mediterranean food”. A door was pushed open, Malky disappeared and his mother Janice picked up the wooden spoon and stirred as Terry entered, saw wifey at the hob and eulogised normal family life.

Terry’s nemesis is Dr Kaskar (Pal Aron), a gynaecologist who is as competitive for his son Ranjit as Terry is for Malky. Like Malky, Ranjit stands disconsolately in the rain as his father shouts puffy-faced encouragement at him. Eventually Terry’s hammering on at the team coach, Tom Blackley, results in Tom collapsing, his condition made more grave with the knowledge that Terry is about to take charge in the dugout. I do hope Tom comes back: he’s Sir Alex Ferguson for the under12s with flying boots and crockery in the changing room and doomy pep talks: “If you lose today, you will spend the rest of you lives in shame.”

The problem for Terry isn’t just on the touchline: Janice has a long-standing crush on the oleaginous Steve, an old friend and now Terry’s boss, who played for Bolton Wanderers. Janice and Steve clearly had a thing: did that “thing” result in Malky? Terry is presently oblivious to their secret past. This layering of plot essentials, whimsy and wit rattled by, lightly directed, and dashed with enough clever characterisation (the female football club director whose day job is an undertaker) to offset the outdated genre. It’s not back-of-the-net stuff, but neither are we at sudden-death penalties just yet.

SuperDoctors (BBC One)

Robert Winston has a caterpillar moustache that can curl sympathetically, critically and occasionally – just occasionally as he is very brainy – with bafflement. In SuperDoctors, the moustache was in multi-expressive overdrive as he looked at how robots were being used in operations. The most horrible, ghastly sight was of a little toddler with mechanical arms sticking into his body.

Happy caterpillar welcomed technological advance. Critical caterpillar, who won out, worried that the tactile essence of being a surgeon – the skill, the duty of care towards a patient – was being lost and that physically operating on someone was more exact than robotic attachments which were surprisingly ungainly and imprecise. The future, Winston inferred, may be bright and shiny but it may also be bad for patients and deskilling for the professionals. I can’t wait for Really Angry Moustache.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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