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My impression of Dagenham is that everyone there seems to spend most of their time miserably yelling their heads off at each other. Admittedly, I've never actually been to Dagenham, so there's every chance that this impression has been formed solely by watching Eastenders.

Eastenders is infamous for its spectacularly angry and depressing Christmas episodes, in which someone always dies horribly and a formal public announcement is made in the Queen Vic that they were carrying on a torrid affair with three of their grandparents. Everyone gets a massive benny on and someone wrestles emotionally with a Christmas tree.

Dagenham & Redbridge FC have followed the festive form of their local soap, with a recent slump dragging the side to the brink of relegation. There wasn't actually a creepy affair or a tearful pine-flinging exhibition, but a 4-0 defeat at Shrewsbury must be football's closest equivalent.

Despite the furious rages Eastenders characters are given to, none of them ever swear. This is because people who watch Eastenders are irredeemably delicate souls who would expire in a faint if they ever hear an oath more forceful than "you bleedin' toerag".

It is uncertain whether Town fans visiting Victoria Road tomorrow will be spared the horrors of foul language, but we should at least forewarn ourselves with the knowledge that Bamass Lettejallow is not an Essex expletive but the name of a Dagenham & Redbridge centre-forward.

In Eastenders, being northern is a kind of shorthand for criminality. Every northern character turns out to be some kind of thug, thief, rapist or drug dealer. This may be the reason why London football fans sing songs about their opponents being dirty northerners. Although, bizarrely, they still seem to sing them when their team is playing Coventry or Leicester.

Every so often the writers of Eastenders decide to make one of their characters into a big football fan. With no real knowledge of the culture they're writing about, they presumably type "football" and "east London" into Google and come up with West Ham, with the result that Albert Square is populated by people who are passionate Hammers fans for about two weeks of every year.

Given that Dagenham are struggling to attract 2,000 fans this season, you can't help suspecting that most of the population supports its local club on a similar basis.

It would be unfair, of course, to dismiss an entire football club as dodgy Cockney barrowboys on the basis of one ropey TV soap. At the same time, though, I have it on good authority that when a Dagenham manager resigns, rather than present the assistant with a formal written invitation to act as caretaker, the chairman simply asks him: "'Ere, can yer look awfter me stall fer a minute?"

Labels: christmas, dagenham, eastenders, london, north, soap, south, swearing

Some people are determined that there's nobody worse off than them. This is the premise behind Monty Python's famous Four Yorkshiremen, who argue over which of them had the most deprived childhood. Rather less well known is the sequel, Four Yorkshiremen and a Yellowbelly, which ends like this:

Fourth Yorkshireman: "We 'ad to live in a shoebox, get up at two in t' mornin', work 29 hours a day down t' mill, and when we got home our dad would slice us in two wi' t' bread knife."
Yellowbelly: "You think that's bad? We 'ad to go an' watch Grimsby Town."

If you look at the balance sheets, though, there are quite a few clubs worse off than the Mariners. But debt seems to work in a strange way in football. Swindon are £5m in the red but this didn't stop them signing Chris Blackburn, Miguel Comminges, Kaid Mohamed, Steve Adams, Jon-Paul McGovern and Billy Paynter in the summer. Coventry's debt totals around £38m yet they maintain a second-flight squad of almost 30 players. And Town are pretty much unable to sign anyone because the club still owes HM Revenue & Customs about £350,000.

Another way to gauge who's worst off is to listen to football phone-ins on the radio. These don't give a very accurate picture, however, as they are invariably dominated by lengthy rants about their underperforming, poverty-stricken clubs by supporters of Fulham or Wolves.

But if you go by the league table, there are only four Football League clubs worse off than the Mariners. This is Dagenham & Redbridge's first ever season in the league, though, so they're probably enjoying it more than we are. Someone needs to tell them it starts losing a bit of its sheen after 107 years.

Lincoln are unexpectedly struggling after a string of top-seven finishes since 2003. But at least our county neighbours can take comfort from the fact that they are unlikely to suffer the heartbreak of defeat in the promotion play-offs this season.

The other two sides really are in trouble. Wrexham's former chairman tried to evict them from their ground, and then they dropped into the fourth division because of the 10-point penalty incurred by entering administration. Then they came within a week of being thrown out of the league. Still, they stayed up last season at the expense of Boston, so it's not all bad.

Probably the worst off of all are Mansfield, this weekend's visitors to Blundell Park. The Stags are still owned by the reviled Keith Haslam, who took interest-free loans out of the club and paid himself a handsome salary for running it. As they kick off tomorrow bottom of the league, many of their supporters would say he has run it into the ground.

Labels: coventry, dagenham, debt, finances, fulham, lincoln, mansfield, monty python, poverty, swindon, wolves, wrexham