TV documentary sheds revealing light on the rise and rise of Gretna

The players, having returned from a trip to Marbella to celebrate another league title, will probably watch the programme through disbelieving eyes as the most surreal week of their careers unfolds.

The documentary is a wrap, but the material keeps on coming, and it will be interesting when the second part is broadcast today week to see how the makers deal with the fact there is a very worthy addendum: Saturday's Scottish Cup final, featuring Gretna and Hearts.

Had the border side not taken their silly cup run so far it's hard to believe the programme would have attracted huge interest beyond the football fraternity. But thanks to their achievements all sorts of viewers will tune in and find there is more to Gretna than the hectares of print devoted to their exploits have managed to convey.

The first half of the chronicle stands alone as a worthy feature. Not because it details a diary of matches, mostly won by a country mile, and how the quirky characters behind the scene absorb them, but because it identifies the aspects of Brooks Mileson's benevolence that make Gretna unique.

Mileson is not the first man to pour money into hiring experienced players to lift a club through the divisions. But he might be the first to spend serious cash, without any prospect of a return, on a scheme that ensures every kid for miles and miles gets free football tuition.

A total of 63 schools in Dumfries&Galloway and 50 in Cumbria come under Gretna's auspices, the narrator tells us. Local kids in the Gretna area pay 10 for holiday training courses that would cost four times as much at bigger clubs. A small community hall is transformed, thanks to an inflatable pitch, into a reincarnation of the Tennent's Sixes as the club stages an anti-drugs tournament between 78 boys' teams.

One scene portrays two charismatic young community coaches, Kevin Somerville and Paul Menlove, travelling to tiny Creetown to get Primary 1 kids practising keepie-up with balloons. The school doesn't pay for this, and the coaches admit they don't do it only because it nourishes the soul. Mileson pays for the whole shebang.

Rarely does the insurance entrepreneur come across as anything other than cuddly and smiley, but he bristles under interview about this pioneering scheme. "Some clubs pay lip service to the term 'community club'," spits the eccentric millionaire, describing their profiteering as "abhorrent."

As well as earnest interviews with the ever-frank Rowan Alexander, a football and survival coach, there are some revealing fly-on-the-wall moments. After a 2-2 draw against Partick Thistle, captain Chris Innes kicks open the dressing- room door and curses. After beating Morton he strides into the room rubbing his hands and yelping.

If this was just a tale of a team that won a league, and Hampden hadn't engulfed the agenda, it wouldn't sustain our attention so well. The momentum lags sometimes, but generally the material is engaging, never more so than when Mileson is feeding alpacas, llamas and pigs, recalling his 1960s glory days and his wife's terms of endearment - "she calls me an ageing hippy."

It's easy to forget that such is the nature of this contemporary triumph, its architects wouldn't have known the first thing about Gretna ten years ago. So it's pleasing that some local representation arrives near the end, in the form of an elderly fan who played for the club for three years in 1954. Another seasoned supporter talks of "living the dream," which reverberates more coming from a local than a well-remunerated convert.

Last word to Mileson, who under blue skies in August tells the camera: "I hate being told 'can't'." Even he underestimated how much Gretna were the little team that could.

Gretna: Field of Dreams. BBC2 Scotland, 9-10pm tonight. Second part: Tuesday, 16 May, same time.