Richmond, our home now for over thirty years, is a lovely place in which to settle, and sharing it with people who have warmed to the environment and adopted it as their home, is a delight and one that gives me both pleasure and stimulation. 

In any such adoption, most of those living here will feel at one with the town’s history, with its architecture, with its eating houses, its greens and its wonderful parks and its riverside. Importantly, it is Richmond’s surroundings that have helped define much of its character as for hundreds of years the town has sat cradled by a sweep of the river Thames and by three great parks that have protected us against the blight of ‘over-development’.

However, against this background of it feeling as ‘ours’, something has happened recently that I see as a threat. Instead of Richmond being a place in its own right, parts of the town have become reduced to fiction. I am talking about the Ted Lasso phenomenon.

In the last few years, since 2020 to be precise, Warner Brothers Studios have produced and streamed through Apple TV a television series that fictionalises Richmond; it has swept across the USA and indeed the world. In brief, it is a comedy series that features Ted Lasso who manages a make-believe football team based in Richmond. There have now been three series with enormous viewing figures and with content that in America has attracted several awards – Emmys – for the actors and for everyone else involved. Interestingly, the series has never appeared on Freeview TV in the UK.

Because Ted Lasso’s football club is in Richmond, and because his home and many of his haunts are there too, the town of Richmond, with its pubs, barber’s shops, cafes, roads and park benches (see illustration) while real for us have been fictionalised by the filmmakers. So viewers – ‘Tedheads’ – are now coming to Richmond in their thousands from all over the world not to see anything real but to gawk at our Richmond as a set for a TV drama!

In an attempt to discover what is going on, a few weeks ago I went on a guided walking tour that took us round the sites of the Ted Lasso story. We met outside Richmond station at 10.00 am on the dot – there would be no waiting for latecomers. As we waited to set off, I counted twenty in the group of whom four were Americans, three Swiss and two Greek with the remainder English and it soon became clear that they all knew about the series in the greatest detail. In that I knew nothing, I was unusual, not to say odd!

For two hours our guide concentrated on what she saw as important to her audience. That we were walking in a town with an extraordinary history was of marginal interest. Accordingly, we saw where Ted Lasso lives (his front door), the park bench on which he sits to think (see illustration), the pub (name changed) where he drinks and so on. Then, as we passed various buildings, it was ‘In the room behind that window that Bill first kissed Anne’*; ‘At this pub Bill later proposed to Anne’; ‘On those front steps Janice kissed Frank good night and then unlocked the door and went in’ etc. etc.

In all this, ‘our’ Richmond became fictional and facts about Richmond as we see them rarely surfaced. There was, however one rather nice exception. We did stop in front of a gateway that once led to the Tudor palace and here our guide pointed out a greyhound carved on Henry VII’s coat of arms; it was because of this that the nickname for the fictional AFC Richmond players was ‘The Greyhounds’. 

Now to the series as a spectacle. After the tour I watched two Ted Lasso episodes and they were a great disappointment. I know it is widely loved, indeed many of my friends are fans, but it did not appeal to me. I saw the characters as implausible, the story line formulaic verging on the excessive and the script crude and silly and to me felt like an adult pantomime, and the pantomime format has never appealed to me. 

However, leaving aside the series, my worry is that in time fictionalising, trivialising, Americanising the real Richmond, might ‘cheapen’ a town with which I and many more identify and love

The illustration shows a photo of the wooden bench on the corner of Richmond Green where Ted Lasso sits with friends and where each day Tedheads sit to have their ‘pilgrimage’ photo taken.

For helping me write this blog, I would like to thank Alan, Anna, Jan, Richard, Julian, Terry, Rohan and Vivien.

* As I knew nothing about the series and did not make notes, these names have been invented.