Lore unto himself

BBC2, 9pm SPORTS car boss John Delorean’s name is now mostly identified with the famous time travelling machine from the hit 1980s Back To The Future films.

In the original movie, the big joke was that eccentric scientist Doc Brown had managed to build a time machine from a Delorean.

But this is the fascinating story behind the car’s real-life inventor, John Delorean, and his doomed attempt to build the sports car of the future.

An American entrepreneur, inventor and engineer, Delorean had film star looks, a famous fashion model wife in Kelly Harmon, an enormous ego and buckets of charisma that drove him to rival the giants of the US car industry.

He had risen to become Vice President of General Motors, the biggest car firm in the world at the time. But he took a shocking gamble and left to set up on his own firm, starting the Delorean Motor Company in 1973, based in Northern Ireland.

But millions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money later, his Belfast business ended in a trail of corporate waste, greed, fraud and, incredibly, an FBI cocainetrafficking sting.

Using rare and unseen footage, with insider interviews and colourful news archives documenting his life and career, this is an in-depth psychological profile of Delorean, who died in 2005, aged 80.

He was a man who rose from the ghettos of Detroit to build his American dream in war-torn Belfast.

But just like many of Doc Brown’s experiments, that dream quickly went up in smoke...

FUTURE VISION John Delorean and, inset, his famous car design