Given the obsession most young British kids have with the national sport, it is surprising that more programs like this don't exist. The BBC have certainly gone all out here, securing cameos by the likes of Carl Froch and Steven Gerrard and giving the show more mainstream advertising than perhaps any CBBC show has had before.
The premise is fairly simple - hot headed football mad young boy from a broken home learns about the trials and tribulations of life and growing up while playing for his school team. This does mean a lot of this is pretty contrived, with social plots dominating the first season and in the second the usual moral parables about 'getting too big for your boots but coming out of it stronger with more humility'. As you can imagine, many 'lessons are learned' and most story lines seem to exist for this purpose only, so the lead character can search within himself and become a better person.
The kid playing Jamie is merely adequate - he does a good line in looking sulky but is pretty wooden and monotone when delivering his lines, and not in a practised 'apathetic teenager' sort of way. He isn't helped by being handed some truly dreadful lines that an eight year old could have written - "no one bad mouths my Granddad and gets away with it" is one that springs to mind but is far from the worst. Some of the adult actors are appalling as well - whoever plays footballer "Theo Baines" manages to put in one of the most woeful performances you could hope to see, and he's only on the screen for about two minutes!
The supporting cast are a bit better, with the two antagonist bully types being well acted and believable, if utterly one dimensional - although there were signs that might change during the second season, with them becoming characters in their own right rather than nasty plot devices to put hurdles in front of the hero. Jamie's friends are reasonable enough, although his closeness with the ginger nerdy kid (who is of course unrealistically kitted out in NHS glasses and only here for 'laugh at the socially awkward geek' comedy relief) stretches the credulity of the viewer a bit too far. Not sure you will find many posh, awkward, chess enthusiast swots hanging out with angry, working class kids on the football team in most schools.
There are definitely some positive things to be said about this. It is certainly as well meaning as you might expect from the militantly left wing BBC, and in a way that doesn't feel too corny or weigh the story down. The setting and subject matter are refreshing, and the quality of filming is excellent, even if they do get bogged down by the usual football movie clichés - slow motion, zooming in, internal monologues, cheap ways of amping up tension etc. It manages to highlight issues like absent fatherhood, anger management and jealousy in a way that most idealistically sunshine filled kids television does not. It even manages to be genuinely humorous at times, especially with the character of Indira, played with a lot of spark by the promising Millie Gibbons.
On the whole, though, it just feels too predictable and wooden at times for me to rate it really highly. I have a feeling this will be most enjoyable for kids aged 5 to 11 - which I'm not sure was the target audience. Older kids will cringe at parts and see through the average script and acting, and the lack of any really engrossing, exciting story lines - this is 2017 and they have anything they want at their fingertips, usually things with more edge and creativity than this.
On a sidenote, you can be almost certain that the soundtrack was put together by a white guy in his early 30s - football matches are soundtracked by the new Radiohead album, and just about every song used on the program (and there are a lot) is by a UK indie/rock band from 1995 to 2010. Not exactly reflective of what estate kids are listening to these days, but hey ho, it seems to work pretty well.
