MY VIEWING this week has been reminiscent of the famous “Football, football, football” Mitchell and Webb sketch, but there is a World Cup happening right now. Having last week watched a fictionalised version of England’s former manager in Dear England, (TV, 2 June), I tuned into the real thing: a documentary presented by the man himself.

Gareth Southgate: Changing the game for young men (BBC1, 8 June) is a worthy attempt to explore what has become a pervasive narrative: teenage boys and young men are suffering, and it has tipped over into a mental-health crisis. This documentary, which follows the themes addressed by Sir Gareth in his Richard Dimbleby Lecture last year, explores some of the possible solutions.

Regular readers of this column may have detected a certain amount of criticism of the furore and moral panicking engendered by the release of Adolescence (TV, 28 March 2025). This documentary sidesteps much of that conversation, but it also fails to engage in deeper analysis by omitting other important factors. How can you discuss teenage boys and young men without mentioning the pernicious effect on their well-being (and the well-being of girls) of increasingly violent online pornography? How can you raise the question of fatherless families as having a negative impact on boys, but not question why so many fathers are not raising their own children?

With characteristic thoughtfulness and compassion, Sir Gareth speaks to teachers, youth workers, mental-health professionals, and policy researchers, and the teenage boys and young men themselves. There is much to praise about the work being done, but I think we ought to be cautious about the proliferation of stifling victim mentalities. If you tell boys enough times that society is setting them up to fail, eventually they will come to believe it.

One of the features of getting older is the tendency to express bafflement at the (inevitable and completely unsurprising) passage of time. Brexit: A very British civil war (BBC2, 8 June) is one such opportunity, as somehow ten years have passed since the vote that divided our nations.

This is flagged as the inside story of the political rivalries, back-stabbing, and nastiness that underpinned the EU referendum. Some of the contributors, who include Sir David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Baroness Hoey, and Lord Gove, really don’t hold back. How truthful their remembrances are, or how retrofitted their motives are, is your guess or mine. Recollections may vary.

Beginning with the Conservative election victory in 2015, roughly one year before the vote, this does have a weirdly historical feel to it: a snatched glimpse of the mostly imagined, more innocent days of the before-times; before Brexit, before Trump, before Covid, before creeping populism. Considering all that has happened over the past decade, it feels like a lifetime, not just ten years, ago.