At the start of the second episode of Six Nations: Full Contact, Netflix’s behind-the-scenes series about the 2023 Six Nations Championship, the England player Ellis Genge tells the camera that rugby union saved his life. It rescued him, he insists, from oblivion. Without it, he says – as he drives round the back streets of Bristol where he was brought up, in the fancy motor that is his reward for a career in the game – he would have fallen in with others in the neighbourhood, selling drugs, ending up in prison. Or worse, he could have followed his dad. And become a plumber.
That is about as deep an insight into rugby as you get in this series: it’s a tough game for tough lads. No hint of consequence from all those head-down collisions, certainly no mention of the 300 ex-pros currently suing the rugby boards for compensation for brain damage. But then Full Contact is not here to offer revelation, to expose or to critique. It is here to sell rugby union.
Ever since Drive to Survive brought many a new fan, particularly in America, to Formula 1, sporting bodies have been queuing up to partner with streaming services in order to proselytise their offering. Golf, athletics, tennis – they have all tried it: use the documentary format to promote the game. And, for all its claims of unique access and behind-the-scenes footage, this is effectively what Full Contact is: one long advertisement.
This is not so much the view of a fly lurking on the dressing-room wall, more that of the public relations executive carefully curating things from the corner. This is rugby presented as the ultimate in gladiatorial combat, all slo-mo crunches and pitchside pyrotechnics, thumping tackles and beautifully spun passes – with the occasional swearword thrown in to insist on authenticity.
That doesn’t mean that, despite the teeth-grinding exposition of the snippets of commentary that serve as voiceover (“England have been playing Scotland since 1871”), there is no fun to be had. Welsh, Irish and Scottish fans will particularly enjoy a rerun of the England team’s haplessness in the 2023 tournament. Not least in the first episode, which concentrates on the two fly-halves as England play Scotland, profiling the pair before, during and after the game.
And while the Scot Finn Russell is a constant grinning presence, playing with verve and panache, celebrating his central part in tartan victory with a couple of cans of lager in the dressing room afterwards, his English counterpart, Marcus Smith, looks a man overwhelmed by expectation and assumption, his skill swallowed up in a collective malaise, misery etched across his young features.
Not that, as a revelation, the yawning chasm between victory and defeat is exactly original. Indeed, if you want to peer through a window into quite how extraordinarily demanding rugby union can be, physically and mentally, give this a swerve and dig out a DVD of Living with Lions, the precursor of modern sporting documentaries, shot on the British and Irish Lions tour of South Africa 27 years ago. Now that really is an insight.
Six Nations: Full Contact is on Netflix from Wednesday 24 January
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