Last night was a particularly weird night for me. You see, I’m from a place called Horwich, which is near Bolton (not in Bolton, near Bolton, before anyone starts). Bolton featured heavily in a run of gags on Mock The Week and then, immediately after, Bolton Wanderers (the club I support) and Horwich was the backdrop from new BBC Two comedy, The Cup (BBC Two, Thursday, 21 August, 9.30pm). So did it ring true or paint a terrible picture of where I’m from?

Bearing in mind that all the aforementioned mean so much to me, and the fact that I played Sunday league football throughout my youth (on the very pitches featured on the show – Green Lane if anyone’s at all interested) it was always inevitable that I would be hypercritical of the show… and with good reason.

Thing is, the joke seemed to be the place and the people who lived there as opposed to some commentary on how dad’s up-and-down the country take Under 11s football too seriously. It was merely a botched look at ‘funny Northerners’. Now, that’s not to say you can’t poke fun at a place… far from it. However, what this show was missing most was a heart. You look at Rab C. Nesbitt and you knew that the show wasn’t saying ‘this is what all Scotsmen are like’… and besides, in amongst the headbutts and the drunken rants was some beautiful pieces of pathos and working-class philosophy. The Cup was simply a ‘Northern Town A is a bit crap’.

This show looked at the importance of football up in Bolton but missed the fierce loyalty to the area shown by just about everyone I’ve grown up with and met. One character, who has moved to the Bolton area said something along the lines of ‘why would I want to leave the rolling hills of Kent to move… here? Well, there’s more fanny in Bolton.’ They’d somehow missed the fact that the beautiful West Pennine Moors were in the background as he spoke.

There’s no question that this comedy is a gentle one… and I was always going to be far too attached to ever call it as it is. One thing is for sure is that they’ve missed a trick. They could have had some real soul in there… and instead, they scraped the barrel. I would have felt the same if it was set in Burnley, Doncaster or Cleethorpes.

I’ll close with a quote from the 19th century Boltonian writer, Allen Clarke.

“The outside folk who have never seen Lancashire think it wholly a Steam Engine Land, a hideous shire of factories, coal pits, forges, ironworks, cinder heaps and slag accumulations, inhabited by barbarians who wear clogs, which which they are in the habit of kicking one another to death. Yet we grant that Lancashire possesses the unpicturesque items mentioned. There is plenty of smoke in Lancashire… but there is also an abundance of heather.”