Staying Up (BBC Choice)

Soon you'll be in a dark and terrible place with violent fanatics screaming for your blood," suggested one character in this half-hour drama, part of BBC Choice's football-themed Waiting For The Whistle series. "What, Sunderland?," replied the other.

Harry Pearson's script was good on inter-club abuse of the verbal variety in this odd little play set against the last day of the football season in May 1990.

Middlesbrough was playing Newcastle United in a North-East derby, the result of which could see the former relegated to the third division or the latter promoted to the first division. Clearly, there was a lot at stake.

Billy Gowland (real life Borough fan Stephen Tompkinson) is stuck with his army unit waiting for the signal to go in action in the Gulf. He's desperately trying to get the match on the radio. His bullying sergeant ("all Geordies have congenital mental disorders or they would not be Geordies") has other ideas.

It ends with Gowland locked in a storeroom with a fellow serviceman called Omar, so named because his mother was a fan of Omar Sharif and he was conceived during a cinema screening of Dr Zhivago. "It could have been worse, Spartacus was showing the next week," he noted.

For all the joking and the football camaraderie, this was a portrait of a man cracking under the strain. Gowland was disturbed and the child's handkerchief he carried around in his pocket was a clue to the cause of his upset. All was eventually revealed as the joking stopped and he tearfully confessed what had caused him to blot his army copybook and throw a punch at the chaplain.

With comedian-of-the-moment Johnny Vegas as a wise-cracking chef and North-East actress Liz Carling in a blink-and-you'll-miss-her cameo as Gowland's wife, the production was cast to the hilt. But the production belonged to the versatile Tompkinson - seemingly never short of a fresh TV role - giving a heartfelt performance as the emotionally disturbed football fan.