Struggling rural footy clubs are in the spotlight, reports Larry Schwartz.

FILMMAKER Steve Thomas grew up in a Victorian coal-mining town in which the local footy team was a community giant that dwarfed all else.

Thomas, whose father worked as an engineer at the open-cut mine more than 140kilometres east of Melbourne, remembers watching the Yallourn Blues "conquering all before them" in the Latrobe Valley League.

"To a young kid in the late '60s, watching the coach rant and rave during the three-quarter-time huddle was like peering into the valley of the giants," he says.

Thomas was barely in his teens when his family left Yallourn, an SEC company town with streets set out as spokes around a hub, for Colac. Yallourn was a ghost town when he went back almost 20 years ago with his brother Mick, frontman for the great rock band Weddings Parties Anything.

By then, the town had been cleared to mine brown coal for a nearby power station. Their old house was one of the few still standing, their father's design for a rowing boat still tacked up in the old shed.

Mick Thomas, who once sang that "Old King Coal ... fed my dad and he fed my mum/Kept us children three", worked on the soundtrack for his brother's new television series, Alive and Kicking.

The program is about the challenges four Tasmanian rural communities face in keeping their local footy clubs going.

Steve Thomas settled in Tasmania in the early 1980s after more than a decade working as an art director and part-time filmmaker in Melbourne. He went on to play half-back flanker for Avoca in the Fingal Valley League.

He turned out for Avoca in a year in which the appointment of a female club president was big news and a nearby mine that had been "the mainstay of the football club" closed.

"People were moving away in droves," Thomas says. "They were really looking for players."

Football was a sure way into the community. He met his two closest friends in the three years he played football in Avoca.

The game was played hard. Several of the players were in their 30s and 40s and, as they slowed down, resorted to a more robust approach. "From a spectator's point of view it (country football) can be wonderful to watch," the filmmaker says. "But as a player you have to be a little bit careful."

Alive and Kicking coincides with a renewed push for a Tasmanian AFL club. Thomas says Tasmanians wonder at attempts by the AFL to establish football teams on the Gold Coast and in western Sydney, when Hobart has a similar population to Geelong and the island has more than 150 football teams and an "amazing (football) heritage".

The series focuses on four unique communities, including Beaconsfield, where goldminer Larry Knight died in the 2006 Anzac Day rockfall and two others were trapped for a fortnight.

Shot over 50 days last year, Alive and Kicking's first episode takes us to Woodsdale, "a football club without a town" in sheep and turnip country. "There is no shop," Thomas says. "There is no pub. There's nothing except farmhouses and then this oval in the middle of it all."

In the second episode, we visit windswept King Island, with three football teams and commitment so strong that two-thirds of its population of 1700 turns out for a grand final.

King Island's veteran football reporter, Geoff French, says the sport "keeps the place alive". "The interesting thing to me about King Island was the fact that it had its own media," Thomas says. "It's got a guy making movies of each match. It's got Geoff French writing this column which is eagerly anticipated each week and a newspaper editor who instinctively knows that football is very important to the place."

Beaconsfield's Tamar Cats are celebrated in the third episode; the fourth is set in Queenstown, where series producer Kath Symmons' family lives.

The film crew had to convince each of the communities they would not be held up to ridicule. In the end, they gained access to behind-the-scenes activities and filmed in change rooms, on-field huddles, homes and workplaces.

"I think there tends to be a distrust of the media," says Thomas, who has produced a two-part series on the Tasmanian indigenous photographer Ricky Maynard, screening on ABC TV next month.

"The major concern was that we were going to depict them as yokels and pick out bits of the season that didn't really show them in a good light. That was never my intention."

Alive and Kicking begins on Wednesday at 8pm on SBS.