Frank Skinner revered Ali — but his own dad was ‘The Greatest’

Never meet your heroes, they say. Frank Skinner did, as a young man, but his idol Muhammad Ali was already a ghost of himself — robbed of his grace and beauty by Parkinson’s disease and with just a flicker of his fabled charisma still burning.

The comic went walking in the great boxer’s footsteps in Frank Skinner On Muhammad Ali (BBC1), though it was more of a starry-eyed sightseeing tour than a serious documentary.

He met Ali’s friends and family, asked a few questions that were not so much respectful as reverential, and got emotional at the graveside.

On the surface, this show was about the man born Cassius Clay, dubbed by the Press ‘the Louisville Lip’, who adopted his new name when he became a black rights activist in the Nation of Islam.

But this wasn’t just a tribute to ‘The Greatest’. It was a sort of transferred hero-worship: Frank’s admiration for Ali was rooted in his intense affection for his own father, about whom he told us almost nothing.

What Mr Skinner Snr’s first name was, we didn’t discover. To Frank he was simply ‘ Dad’. This was a boy’s- eye view of his father, conjured in memories of how they used to listen to boxing matches together via a tinny transistor radio at the dead of night.

When Ali fought the likes of Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson in the Sixties, the broadcasts went out in the small hours by British time. Frank’s father would wake him with a whisper and a tap on the boy’s bedroom door, and the two would tiptoe like conspirators to the kitchen where the radio was.

Frank learned better than to snuggle up too close to his old man on the sofa — as the fight reached its peak, Dad would be miming every punch as his imagination went into overdrive. Skinner Jnr was liable to catch an accidental elbow in the chops.

Ali was an astonishing man. As an athlete and a figurehead in the battle for racial equality, he may never be surpassed. But Frank only met him at a book signing and it is impossible to love someone deeply if you never knew them. Immense admiration is not the same as real love.

This documentary was steeped in love. Though Frank didn’t say it out loud, he didn’t have to: he revered Ali, but he adored his dad.

The opposite emotion came under forensic examination in Catching A Killer (C4), a detailed account of a murder investigation from the first 999 call to the jury’s verdict of ‘guilty’.

A film crew hovered at every scene, even capturing the moment when Natalie Hemming’s body was discovered in woodland, and the expressions on her sisters’ faces as family liaison officers warned them that her disappearance was now being treated as murder.

There was no mystery about the crime. Police knew who had done it from the outset, and the second we saw Natalie’s weaselly partner Paul, through the lens of a police uniform body- camera, so did we.

The constant soundtrack of windchimes and eerie glockenspiel was irritating and unnecessary. But it couldn’t detract from the impact of the interviews, most of all the way a detective sensitively coaxed crucial information from Natalie’s six-year-old son.

He had heard his father beat his mum to death — it ‘sounded like thunder,’ the little boy said. And he had peeped through the lounge doorway as Hemming mopped up blood.

No father could inflict a crueller torment on a child.