A football team normally heads out onto the pitch determined to win – unless, perhaps, the match has been fixed. Or unless they’ve been under Gestapo pressure to lose. That was what happened at the legendary “Death Match” in Kiev in August 1942. A team of Ukrainians - eight drawn from previous Dynamo Kiev sides and three from local Lokomotiv - playing under the moniker FC Start had reassembled after the Nazi invasion of the city. Most of them had been working in a local bakery.

So that’s all over then. Which isn’t good. The gnawing anxiety for followers of Twenty Twelve, the programme whose theme song is “There may be trouble ahead...", has been whether real-life events would become so like it - or even worse, more like it than it could be - that the programme would become redundant. The extempore absurdities of Jeremy Hunt, the lost Olympics taxi drivers and G4S have given its scenarios a tense run for their money, and I'd guess a lot of BBC nails are down to the quick by this week.

Movies often come unwittingly in pairs, whether you're talking Capote and Infamous (both about Truman Capote) or Valmont and Dangerous Liaisons (both adapted from the epistolary novel by Laclos). And so it was that the late 1990s saw the release in successive years of Prefontaine (1997) and Without Limits (1998), both telling of the same American track star who died in 1975, age 24.

Jane Treays's previous film about diver Tom Daley was 2010's The Diver and His Dad, which followed the amphibious teenager as he sat his GCSEs and defended various titles. Ominously, it also charted the progress of his father Rob's struggle against a brain tumour.

Triumph, despair, glory and struggle: the Olympic Games might technically be a sporting event, but in spirit and essence they are pure drama. Film-makers may have shouted loudest about this discovery, generating hit after Olympic-themed hit throughout the 20^th century, but composers also know a thing or two about sporting thrills, with almost 300 years of Olympic action in the opera house.

Though this 1966 comedy was a light and fluffy thing, it was gazed upon benignly by the critics, mostly because it was a late vehicle for the well-oiled Cary Grant charm machine. It proved to be his last film, in fact. Others viewed it equally fondly because it contained scenes of Grant in his boxer shorts, a challenge he tackled with panache despite his 62 years.

When we think of the 1972 Olympics in Munich, we do not think of US swimmer Mark Spitz’s record-breaking seven gold medals, or Finland’s Lasse Virén making his extraordinary comeback from a fall in the 10,000 metres to a record-breaking win. No, the 1972 Olympics will always be remembered for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes (and coaches) by Palestine’s Black September organisation. Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich takes this act, portrayed in a gripping opening sequence, as its starting point.

It was Lenin who realised early in the Russian Revolution that “of all the arts, film is for us the most important” and Hitler and Goebbels perceived the immense propaganda potential of the Olympics through the medium of film. The 1936 Olympic Games took place in Berlin a few months after Hitler’s armies occupied the Rhineland. Hitler spared no expense in making it the best organised and most efficiently equipped in the history of the Olympics.

Making fictional movies about sport is the devil's own job. They generally don't appeal to non fans while those who follow the game in question spend their time mocking the action scenes as actors pretending to be sportsmen and women usually fail to convince - as is the case with the stars of Wimbledon (2004) and Match Point (2005).

Rio Ferdinand did four years' ballet training as a child, England manager Graham Taylor sent the national squad to dance classes, while the Royal Ballet once ran an active football team. Ballet and football have long been secret lovers backstage. But they have only been rarely seen out together in public.