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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

Much of our attention has focused recently on the BBC, following a widely observed and very bitter disagreement with the most powerful unelected figure in British public life. OK, so one or two people have been talking about that business with the Queen instead, but most of us are just riveted to the Corporation's almighty row with John Fenty.

The Town chairman has been criticised by some for failing to agree commentary rights with Radio Humberside and tying up an alternative deal with Compass FM. One issue is the geographical reach of these two broadcasters. Humberside can be heard as far north and west as the Yorkshire Moors and as far south as the Wash, while some listeners insist that the Compass FM signal begins to lose a bit of its oomph once you get past Scartho Baths.

Another concern is that, with Town and the BBC at loggerheads, the minimal radio coverage will be matched by a television blackout – or black-and-white-out, if you will. Look North's new Monday sports round-up is pointedly ignoring the Mariners, and Mr Fenty is prevented by Football League rules from signing the lucrative Compass-style breakaway deals that are presumably on the table from Sky TV, Setanta and the local cable operation on channel 8,319 run by two teenagers in a shed with a 60-watt bulb and a nearly-new cameraphone.

But the critics forget that we Grimbarians like things to be on a small, local scale. Grimsby and Cleethorpes are like a village: there may be 120,000 people living here but my mum still bumps into someone she knows every time she does the shopping, and when I was little most of our holidays were taken on the Humberston Fitties.

Furthermore, if the club goes unnoticed by any media beyond the end of the road, the rest of the world will never know we're here, and then they can't take the mickey out of us and make lame fish jokes and stuff.

And, best of all, by keeping everything local, Mr Fenty could create the basis for a 'Grimsby nation' along the lines of the 'Geordie nation' promised by Sir John Hall at Newcastle United. True, the Magpies didn't quite field a team of 11 local lads or get their own elected regional assembly – they signed Faustino Asprilla and chucked away the league title instead – but I'm never prouder to support Town than when I log on to Mariners World and hear Danny North's broad Grimsby accent.

Then, finally, North East Lincolnshire Council could declare independence from the UK, and install Julie Peasgood or Patricia Hodge as queen. That way, there'd be no more royal rows with the BBC and John McDermott might get that knighthood at last.

Labels: bbc, broadcasting, compass fm, fentydome, media, newcastle, north, parochialism, radio, smalltown