Hoping to make things Wright

IAN WRIGHT: HOME TRUTHS

IN emotional scenes, former football hero and pundit Ian Wright breaks down as he revisits his childhood home where he suffered horrific abuse.

The 57-year-old dad-of-eight has set out to investigate the effect of growing up in a psychologically abusive and violent home.

But it means finally confronting his own experience, which saw his stepdad cruelly beat and verbally abuse him and his mother.

“Growing up, our home was not a happy one, there was a lot of violence,” says Ian, who lived in a South London house that they shared with another family. “My mum, me and my older brother Maurice lived in fear.”

Ian returns to the single room the family lived in, and cries as he remembers his stepdad grabbing his mother by the neck and throttling her.

He also tells how his cruel stepdad, who left the family when Ian was a teen, would make him face the wall during Match of the Day because he knew he liked watching it.

In dramatised sequences the 10-year-old Ian is played by Asad-shareef Muhammad.

Devastatingly, Ian’s mother was also abusive, regularly beating him and telling him she wishes she’d terminated him.

“All I felt when I was nine was anxious and scared,” says Ian, who wants to piece his confusing childhood together.

It’s an emotional and confronting journey for Ian, who meets others who have experienced domestic abuse in their childhood, as well as professionals to talk through his own trauma and charity workers trying to help abusers change their behaviour.

Ultimately, Ian hopes he can begin to forgive his mother and move on from the past.

BBC1, 9pm