WHY IT WAS SO CRUEL TO LET A DRUNK GEORGE BEST APPEAR ON TV... BY HIS CLOSE PAL PARKY
Legendary broadcaster Sir Michael Parkinson has said that George Best’s infamous drunken interview with Terry Wogan 28 years ago was one of the worst moments of television he had ever seen. He insisted that the ex-Manchester United and Northern Ireland star, who launched into a foul-mouthed rant on the live Wogan show about his sexual exploits, would never have been allowed onto his programme in that condition. “It was shocking,” Sir Michael said. “I don’t blame Terry. I blame his backroom team. The host of a programme like that has too much to worry about and he can’t be all over the shop because he’s doing the show.
“But the producers should have looked at George and told him ‘Sorry pal, we can’t do this. Just go home.’
“There’s no sense in having a man on a talk show who’s drunk to speechlessness. It was pathetic and cruel and awful. It should not have been permitted to happen to a proud man like George who made an ass of himself in front of millions of viewers.
“And in terms of where he was with his health at the time, that interview wouldn’t have done him any good at all.”
Sir Michael was speaking as he promoted his new book George Best: A Memoir which he said was a loving tribute to his friend whom he described as the best footballer he’d ever watched and a most extraordinary man.
Sir Michael, who’d been working in Granada Television when George arrived in Manchester as a 17-year-old from Belfast, said he knew he was special from the first time he saw him playing for United.
He added: “My view was confirmed by Sir Matt Busby and by other great players like Pat Crerand who said that George could excel in every outfield position. I can’t think of any other footballer you could say that about, certainly not Messi or Ronaldo. George was on his own in that respect, a complete footballer.”
Sir Michael also said that George “looked like an angel” and it was no surprise to him when he became the face of the Sixties. “He was commercially designed for greatness,” he added.
“The sadness was that he arrived too soon. If it had been 10 years later he mightn’t have got into all the trouble he did.
“Maybe they would have attended to his needs and understood his personality before all the bad things happened. By the time Matt Busby understood what was happening to George, it was too late. Nowadays there are so many scientists and agents involved with footballers and George would have been far better protected than he was.
“But there he was in Manchester, even then the greatest footballer in the world living in Mrs Fullaway’s digs in a council house. He was getting so many sack loads of letters from young
Ahead of an event in Belfast this month to launch his new book George Best: A Memoir, the veteran broadcaster talks to Ivan Little about his close friendship with the ex-Manchester United star flourishing as they went drinking together — and about the one question he wished he’d asked him
girls that they thought the bedroom floor might collapse under the weight of them all.
“Mrs Fullaway was trying to look after him and he had an agent who was living in Huddersfield and didn’t quite understand what was going on.”
Sir Michael revealed that George wasn’t the first Belfast-born footballer that he admired in England.
As a Barnsley fan, he watched in awe as Danny Blanchflower, who went on to captain and later manage Northern Ireland, showed his class for the Yorkshire team.
By an odd twist of fate, Blanchflower (right) was from the Bloomfield area of east Belfast, just over a mile from where Best was raised in the Cregagh estate.
Blanchflower played for Glentoran, the team that rejected George Best because they thought he was too small to make it in the Irish League. “I’d never seen anything like Blanchflower before,” said Sir Michael. “And then along came George Best.”
Sir Michael said that as his friendship with George flourished the two of them probably shared too many drinks together. The TV interviewer said that he developed a drink problem, but George’s drinking spiralled out of control.
Sir Michael said: “George was a deeply flawed character in the sense that he had an illness. His drinking wasn’t all about wilful trips down the boozer. “It was a genetic problem but essentially he always remained the same guy, a good companion. He was funny, self-effacing and he had a keen wit.
“He wasn’t a bullsh***er. He didn’t walk into a room with any bravado as if to say that he was the great George Best. He was a quiet presence.”
Parky who came face-to-face with the great and the good from the worlds of sport, entertainment and politics said George was the least complaining of any superstar he ever met.
He added: “He wasn’t a whinger. He blamed himself for his problems. He didn’t want any sympathy.
“If someone suggested he’d faced a terrible tragedy with his life through his drinking he would say that it wasn’t a tragedy, it was his own doing.
“It killed him in the end but it was refreshing that he didn’t try to shift the blame.”
I asked Sir Michael, who interviewed George on many occasions, if there was one question he didn’t get to ask him.
“I suppose when he was nearing his death you would have had to ask him how things might have been different or if he would have done things differently,” replied Sir Michael, who said that he didn’t see George towards the end of his life.
“He didn’t want me to see him like that and I didn’t want to see him like that. But that’s what good friends are like. You don’t want to see your good mate rotting away.”
Sir Michael said he and George had sometimes wondered if his life would have been any different if he’d been able to have a normal family life with his mother, father and his siblings. George’s
George was commercially designed for greatness, the sadness was he arrived too soon
parents, Dickie and Ann, decided to stay in Belfast rather than move with their other children to Manchester and their exiled son’s visits home were curtailed by the Troubles. There were reports in the Seventies that George was told the IRA were going to shoot him.
“He never talked to me about the Troubles,” said Sir Michael. “I knew there were threats but I didn’t talk to him about anything like that.”
“I don’t think it would have made too much difference if his family circumstances had been different in his early years,” said Sir Michael, who never thought that George would live to an old age: “He was reckless in his private life and that kind of reckless behaviour often leads to tragedy.”
Sir Michael said that some observers had claimed he was like a father figure to George but he added: “He had a perfectly good father in Dickie.”
George’s mother Ann battled alcoholism as the one-time teetotal hockey player turned to drink after she became overwhelmed by all the attention focused on her and her family in the wake of her son’s worldwide fame.
Sir Michael said: “Some people thought George’s drinking was maverick behaviour. But it wasn’t that at all. I was the maverick drinker, someone who could get rid of a drink problem by taking a stern look at yourself. But George never had that. He had a genetic problem which needed special care from people who knew about these things but again it was all too late.”
George told Sir Michael he sought help after realising that he had become a “bad drinker” after being on the booze for 22 days without food.
Sir Michael said: “George also talked to me about what he had learnt during his time playing football in America. He met a couple of guys there who had been through the same thing as him but came out the other end. Yet again it was too late.”
He also remembered how well-meaning counsellors would offer to ‘advise’ George about how to cope with his drinking addiction.
“They were convinced that they could help him and I would arrange for them to have lunch with George. But they would come back more p***** than he was. He could drink them under the table,” said Sir Michael, who added that the good days with George were great days.
The author has a wealth of anecdotes about George. He spoke of how he used to give him a bed for the night and often found the next morning that he’d shared it with his latest glamorous conquest. Sir Michael said his last meeting with George was when he asked him to attend a charity function at his son’s pub in Berkshire. “I told him that a guy had offered to give the charity £20,000 if I could persuade George to come along and he agreed, but I told him that I would be watching him to ensure that he didn’t get a drink.
“The next morning he rang me to say that he’d enjoyed the evening and I told him that’s because he’d stayed sober.”
Sir Michael told his wife Mary that he thought George might be okay.
But any thoughts that his friend had turned a corner were soon dispelled.
George was eventually admitted to hospital in west London and passed away in the early hours of November 25, 2005, after losing his battle with illnesses linked to alcoholism.
Sir Michael was working in Australia at the time of George’s funeral but when he saw the television coverage he resolved to write a book about him to follow up on the biography he wrote in 1975.
“At first I thought I would leave it at that book. But I reckoned he’d died young and there were still things to be said about him.”
Sir Michael, who said he didn’t regret knowing George and in fact counted himself lucky to have been his friend, will promote his book at a special night in the Titanic Hotel in Belfast on November 25 organised by Eason. “I’m looking forward to coming to Belfast,” said Sir Michael, who will make a sentimental pilgrimage to his friend’s old family home in Burren Way in the Cregagh estate.
He said that on one previous visit he was returning to the airport in a taxi and the driver asked him why he was in Belfast.
He added: “I told the bloke that I’d been meeting George Best but the driver obviously hadn’t spotted him sitting in the back and he launched into a diatribe about him, calling him everything under the sun for his drinking and lots more besides. George didn’t say a word.
“The driver still hadn’t noticed him by the time we got to the airport where George got out of the taxi, walked up to him, paid him the fare and told him to keep the change.
“It was brilliant”