Something to watch tonight: Thursday 19 September

Fire in Babylon (Riley, 2010)

One of the most sur­pris­ing devel­op­ments in my life over the last few years is my decreas­ing level of interest in watch­ing cricket.

I look back on how I organ­ised my sum­mers as if that was a dif­fer­ent per­son. Plans would be made around the World Series Cricket sched­ule. The Boxing Day test at Wellington’s Basin Reserve was a ritu­al for the few years that New Zealand Cricket thought it was worth scheduling.

One of the high­lights of my tick­et­ing career was work­ing as a super­visor for the test match in February 1997, hand­ing out the com­pli­ment­ary tick­ets to a vis­it­ing England team that included Nasser Hussain and Alec Stewart, cap­tained by Michael Atherton.

New Zealand were woe­ful in that game. It would be Lee Germon’s final game as cap­tain, replaced for the third test by Stephen Fleming, a move that would be the first step in a won­der­ful renais­sance and the begin­ning of my favour­ite peri­od of crick­et watching.

Even earli­er than that, though, I would take annu­al leave from work so that I could spend all five days at the Basin, usu­ally there wait­ing for the gates to open each morn­ing. The Basin Reserve had prac­tice wick­ets on the out­field so you could wander around to the Southern End and stand six feet behind the bats­man – far closer than any wick­et keep­er would to a fast bowler.

In 1987, the West Indies were tour­ing so I got to see Viv Richards in those nets, facing up to his own fiery fast bowl­ers: Joel Garner, Malcolm Marshall, Courtney Walsh and Michael Holding (whose seem­ingly effort­less action earned him the nick­name “Whispering Death”.)

One ball from Holding was slightly too full of length and Richards caressed it back past him with such per­fect tim­ing and power that I heard it hit the advert­ising boards on the oppos­ite side of the ground.

So, back in 2011, a film like Fire in Babylon was always going to be right up my alley:

Friends will know that I occa­sion­ally com­pare Test crick­et to Shakespeare (in this ana­logy One-day crick­et is Chekov and T20 is more like Everybody Loves Raymond, but I digress). If I’m right then that peri­od dur­ing the late 70s and early 80s – when the West Indies used their pun­ish­ing bat­tery of fast bowl­ers to force the rest of the game into a feeble sub­mis­sion – must have been Titus Andronicus. Talk about blood, boy!

The doc­u­ment­ary Fire in Babylon, fresh from the Festival, makes an expli­cit and fas­cin­at­ing link between the explo­sion of West Indian power on the crick­et field and the exchange of colo­ni­al­ism for inde­pend­ence. With the assist­ance of a reg­gae soundtrack – the oth­er great example of Caribbean pride – and a com­bin­a­tion of vivid still pho­to­graphy and as-it-happened tele­vi­sion cov­er­age, Fire in Babylon argues its case extremely well. All too often sports doc­u­ment­ar­ies are dreary things – end­less talk­ing heads remin­is­cing about how much bet­ter things were in the good old days. FiB has its share of those but some­thing else as well – a fire in its belly.

But now, to quote Paul Kelly’s 1988 song “Bradman”: “the play­ers all wear colours/the cir­cus is in town”. I have no truck with T20 – a ridicu­lous game played in end­less mean­ing­less tour­na­ments designed to please only broad­cast sched­ules and book­makers – and the greatest ver­sion of the game, test crick­et, is now so deval­ued as to be a shad­ow of its former self.

The West Indies are now a second-tier crick­et­ing nation and that breaks my heart.

Also reviewed that week in the Capital Times (pos­ted to F&S on this very day in 2011) were Terrence Malick’s mas­ter­piece The Tree of Life (no doubt I’ll fea­ture that here soon), pho­to­journ­al­ism drama The Bang Bang Club, Cary Fukunaga’s adapt­a­tion of Jane Eyre star­ring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, Finnish doc­u­ment­ary Steam of Life and the Ryan Reynolds/Jason Bateman “com­edy” The Change-Up.

Where to watch Fire in Babylon

Aotearoa and Australia: Streaming on DocPlay

Canada: Digital rental

Ireland and UK: Not cur­rently available

USA: Streaming on Peacock, Kanopy (via par­ti­cip­at­ing lib­rar­ies) or FreeVee (free with ads)