GIVEN that this is a new weekly column it's only polite to begin with a formal introduction. We want Screenshot to be a review of some sports programme which was on during the week, they said. Play it for laughs, they said. Give the readers something to put a spring in their step, they said. Oh dear. You see, well, the thing is ... we're off to a pretty poor start here.
First of all, Surviving Gazza (Channel 4, Monday) wasn't a sports programme. Secondly, there wasn't a single laugh in its entire 80 dark minutes. Not even close. And no-one involved in it - nor anyone who watched - was in any danger of having a spring in their step. Oh it was hard. Powerful, compelling television, but hard.
Football isn't instinctively kind-hearted on the matter of mental illness. When Paul Gascoigne was sectioned under the Mental Health Act last February, Celtic supporters chanted "let's all laugh at Gazza" and "Gazza's a psycho". By the cruel logic of the terraces he was a Rangers icon reduced to the nuthouse, and therefore game for a laugh. It was harsh, unforgiving, but also remote and distant. It was mocking "Gazza" the tabloid alter ego, the raspberry-blowing buffoon stumbling out of nightclubs.
Surviving Gazza wasn't about Gazza, if he even exists any more. It was a harrowing fly-on-the-wall documentary about Paul Gascoigne, at least until he went awol 12 days after filming began. After that it was about the broken family he has reduced to the role of helpless witnesses to his headlong rush towards an early grave.
Gascoigne himself agreed to a camera crew covering his departure from the Priory Clinic and his attempted rehabilitation and partial reconciliation with his ex-wife Sheryl. Sheryl herself is no angel and 22-year-old glamour model daughter Bianca has traded off her adopted dad's surname (Bianca and Mason, 19, were taken in by Gascoigne when he began a relationship with Sheryl, while 12-year-old Regan is the couple's only biological child).
But it was impossible to watch without feeling huge sympathy for Sheryl and the children. Here was a family sometimes desperate for the phone to ring, other times deciding it would be better not to answer it. They knew when it would be Paul: drunk, abusive, threatening, manipulative, apologetic, crying, pleading Paul.
Sheryl turned to a therapist who advised that she was doing more harm than good by offering Gascoigne a permanently open door back into their lives. Sheryl and the children flew to Portugal and tracked him down to a hotel room during one of his days-long bouts of chronic drinking. They emerged a few minutes later shaken by his appearance, threats and abuse and walked away from the hotel and from him. The programme attempted to be upbeat about the family's prospects of a new start but Gascoigne himself is beyond hope.
"Surviving Gazza" is repeated at 10pm tonight on More 4. Watch it and be thankful for its single act of kindness in 80 minutes: namely that the camera did not follow Sheryl into the horror of that hotel room.
As for Screenshot, the laughs can begin next week.
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