The shocking toll football and celebrity took on Gazza
England’s most naturally gifted footballer of modern times should be reflecting on the glory, now; reminiscing about the goals and the touch which often made him unplayable.
But Paul gascoigne is still so damaged that he could not even make it into the room where a documentary about his life was being screened this week.
He arrived as expected at soho’s Charlotte street Hotel on Thursday lunchtime, though he didn’t appear for a planned Q&a with presenter Manish Bhasin, after a BBC screening.
The explanation was that he ‘just didn’t feel up to it’ because it was all still ‘too raw for him’.
But the clips — which book-end the two documentary films — of gascoigne walking in his fishing gear near his home say everything about the toll football and celebrity took. He looks shockingly gaunt and barely recognisable.
There is also an aching sadness about the closing credits, stating that gascoigne — who has always craved company — now ‘lives alone in the south of England’.
‘I don’t like being on me own. When you’re on your own you think a lot,’ he says in one of the many clips the films bring together.
gascoigne’s collapse into a life of unremitting chaos is so familiar that the story of how and why it happened has become lost. There was the booze, of course. Even on the eve of the squad selection for the 1998 World Cup squad, he downed pina coladas and gave renditions of My Way in the England hotel, witnessed by manager glenn Hoddle, who promptly omitted him.
But the films, directed by sampson Collins, are a reminder of the brutal celebrity storm gascoigne found himself at the centre of from the late 1980s, when his combustible, sometimes violent relationship with sheryl Failes — who he married — became the prime commodity in a tabloid circulation war.
desperate photographers hid in car boots and rigged taxi ranks to get shots of him drunk. His phone was hacked three or four times a day, one of the perpetrators tells the film-makers.
But the intimate relationships that the News of the World’s Rebekah Wade and the Mirror’s Piers Morgan carefully cultivated with the player’s girlfriend made subterfuge barely necessary. They knew every false step gascoigne made. ‘It was sad but it was a character story for the newspapers,’ Morgan said at the time.
If all of this had happened now, gascoigne would have had some weapons at his disposal; communications staff to steer him away from some of those places and put across his side.
But in gascoigne’s world, cameras materialised on planes, in nightclubs, in his driveway and he alone was left to deal with them, often farcically.
In the second of the films, a row with paparazzi outside his house degenerates into him ‘threatening’ to take them on at football on his front lawn — ‘me against you’ — which seems his only recourse. a ball is produced, which he kicks into a pond. The predators gleefully film themselves retrieving it and can barely believe their luck.
gascoigne’s personal assistant Jane nottage writes a book about him, after they part company, disclosing intimate details about his eating disorders. The Fa get him counselling — but only after he is accused of hitting his wife. But, in the days when mental health did not seem to be a concept, there is not the remotest sense of a need to deal with this young man’s disintegration.
The occasional manager — like Bobby Robson and Terry Venables — thought they knew how to deal with him and that was it.
There are pitifully few positive influences. another of the clips captures gascoigne at home describing how things are going to be different, with the sound of snoring in the background. ‘That’s me dad snoring, by the way,’ gascoigne says. ‘Happy thinking about his next pint,
wondering where it’s coming from.’
The so-called friends who milked his glory and won their own kind of fame are not with gascoigne now. Jimmy Five Bellies wouldn’t co-operate with the film-makers. gascoigne’s ‘advisers’ in recent years didn’t even bother giving him all the information about the BBC film project. The idea only progressed when he parted company with them.
It is surprising that the filmmakers didn’t put gascoigne in front of the camera and ask for his testimony. The option was available to them; he has given this project his blessing and encouraged his family to provide footage.
But there is perhaps something appropriate, in a film detailing how he was filmed and interviewed to death, about gascoigne not being asked to say more.
His regret does not seem to be that a lucrative post-playing world of spotlight, acclaim and punditry have never been his to enjoy. It is the loss of those days when he could step on to a football field and find the only form of free, unfettered self-expression he has ever known. But he could not find the confidence to step into a room and say that. The first episode of Gazza screens on Wednesday at 9pm on BBC Two and will also be available on iPlayer.