Fleapit revisited:Crock of Gold:A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan.

"I've been loving you a long time. Down all the years, down all the days. And I've cried for all your troubles, smiled at your funny little ways" - A Rainy Night in Soho, The Pogues

"You want Paddy. I'll give you fucking Paddy" - Shane MacGowan 

I've loved the music of The Pogues for over three and a half decades now. My first Pogues purchase was their third single, 1985's A Pair of Brown Eyes, and so impressed with it was I that it wasn't long before I bought the album it came from. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash was brilliant from its raucous start (The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn) to its emotional epic closer, a cover of Eric Bogle's And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda.

For me, Rum, Sodomy & the Lash remains the high point of The Pogues career (though '86's Poguetry in Motion EP ran it close). The melding of traditional Irish music (fiddles, tin whistles, and uileann pipes) with punk energy was powerful enough but Shane MacGowan gave the band an extra dimension that propelled the band directly into my heart. Both in the brilliant devil-may-care style of his vocals and in the deep, romantic poetry that imbued these tales of drinking, loving, emigrating, and contracting syphilis in Cologne. MacGowan wrote so beautifully about London life that I truly believe he was one of the main attractions, chief pulls, of me moving here.

When I loaned the tape of Rum, Sodomy & the Lash to my Irish grandad, Tom, I warned him there was swearing on it. He told me he'd swear straight back at it. I never found out what he thought of it but, one afternoon, I returned home to find it resting on a kitchen surface. Returned without a comment. In retrospect, their star shone brightly and brilliantly but it didn't shine for all that long. Convention would have it that that was down to singer Shane MacGowan's propensity for alcohol and drugs but would Julien Temple's Crock of Gold:A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan (BBC4/iPlayer) prove that convention untrue?

Not exactly. But it was more nuanced that. A film made by people (Johnny Depp & MacGowan's girlfriend Victoria Mary Clarke are both involved) who clearly adore MacGowan will, necessarily, be a partial retelling of his, and The Pogues, story but it is far from a hagiography. 

Interviews with Shane (usually drinking - at one point a glass of Asahi Japanese beer, smoking, swearing, being pushed around in a wheelchair, and making that weird hissing sound that his laughter has evolved into) are interspersed with informal chats with his parents Maurice and Therese, his sister Siobhan, his girlfriend Victoria, Bobby Gillespie, Johnny Depp, and Gerry Adams.

Quite a line up on its own but when you chuck in vintage interview footage of Joe Strummer, Gay Byrne, Danny Baker, The Dubliners' Ronnie Drew, and wrongfully imprisoned member of the Birmingham Six Paddy Hill you've got a very rich seam of British and Irish history and it's abundantly clear what side of that divide Shane MacGowan identifies with.

He fondly remembers growing up in a "sepia brown house" in Tipperary and hearing stories about Black and Tans as well as being introduced to booze, fags, and song at an early age. His memories that follow his move to London are less rose tinted but he tells them with the same relish. Being taught by Franciscan nuns in Tunbridge Wells (pointedly, he drops the Royal), having a nervous breakdown, and walking the streets in an era of paddy bashing and "no blacks, no Irish, no dogs".

The young MacGowan got into reggae and sniffing glue. He lived with his family in one of the Barbican tower blocks and attended Westminster School (a "stupid fucking cunt of a place", according to his father) where he sold speed to posh kids wanting to go out dancing or cram for exams. He got, predictably, expelled and ended up stacking shelves in a supermarket and going even more off the rails.

Eating acid and becoming a rent boy (a story told in The Old Main Drag) eventually lead him to a spell in Bedlam psychiatric hospital where he got into painting and writing songs (his first composition, Instrument of Death, was about the atrocities carried out by American soldiers in the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War).

Released from Bedlam, he fell into the orbit of The Sex Pistols and the punk scene. A life changing moment for him as he saw people like him up there doing it. John Lydon, then Johnny Rotten, was even another London Irish boy. Lydon wasn't sure what MacGowan was doing dressing up in a Union Jack outfit but the fact he accessorised it with the letters IRA written on his forehead suggest he was far from one of today's flag-shaggers.

MacGowan's infamy grew when he appeared in the NME having had part of his ear bitten off at a Clash gig. He started putting out his own fanzine, Bondage, and formed his first band, The Nipple Erectors. Later The Nips. They were a decent enough garage punk band but it was when MacGowan, along with friends Spider Stacy and Jem Finer, formed a new band that things really began to change.

Demotivated by the catwalk the punk scene had become and the new romantic movement that followed in its wake and none too inspired by the alternative route of listening to African or South American music, their idea was to play their own indigenous music. Infused with the spirit of punk and the heart of the great Irish writers that MacGowan so admired.

The name, Pogue Mahone (famously Gaelic for Kiss my Arse), was shortened to The Pogues and under Frank Murray's management they grew to be London's most rowdy and most unmissable live experience before converting that passion and energy into songs that broke into the charts (unusual enough for that sort of band in those days), and then reached the top ten and even made number one.

They worked as hard as they partied and for the first three albums, in MacGowan's retelling, it was all great fun but, eventually, three hundred gigs in one year took its toll as surely as did MacGowan getting into strong drugs to such a degree that he's never quite come back. Doctors gave him six months to live (thirty years ago!) but MacGowan says now it was his reaction to having perform songs like Fiesta which he believed was total crap.

Not what The Pogues were about at all. He also claims he felt a deep sense of shame that he'd never joined the IRA and was affected by falling out of a van drunk in Japan (going as far as to say he went into a 'coma'). Either way, it caused tensions within the band and soon he was fired. An event he claims he was delighted about and one that freed him up to form The Popes. 

A band in which he was undoubtedly number one and called the shots but a band, despite some great music, whose legacy will never surpass that of The Pogues. As this life story is slowly coaxed out of Shane, it is interspersed with footage of The Pogues at the peak of their powers. Ripping through stone cold classics like Sally MacLennane, A Pair of Brown Eyes, London Girl, Sick Bed of Cuchuillan, Dark Streets of London, Waxie's Dargle, A Rainy Night in Soho, and If I Should Fall From Grace With God.

The Broad Majestic Shannon, Dark Streets of London, And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, Boys from the County Hell ("lend me ten pounds and I'll buy you a drink"), The Wild Rover, and, of course, A Fairytale of New York with Kirsty MacColl. These scenes almost made me ache with nostalgia and showing at a time of lockdown during a global pandemic the idea of being at a gig jumping around with others looked like the tastiest forbidden fruit imaginable.

Some of the other scenes that are interspersed into the film work less well. While stories of the Great Hunger, Irish Republicanism, and Jesus (most definitely the Roman Catholic iteration of) are important to give us a feel for the milieu into which MacGowan grew up but I wasn't quite sure the stock footage of Irish peasants riding around on horses and baling hay really brought much to the party.

The leprechauns were simply unnecessary. The animated sections, too, won't have been to everyone's taste. Weird cartoons of Fin McCool (the hunter-warrior of Irish mythology), the Salmon of Knowledge, and an infant Shane MacGowan drinking and dancing on tables could come across a touch twee (in a film that already had too much Fairytale, we didn't need too many fairy tales as well) and later, more druggy, animations of MacGowan's introduction to LSD had a kind of R. Crumb Fritz the Cat vibe.

There was even a nod to William Blake's Ancient of Days. They distract, slightly, from the story more than they embellish it and with such a rich and fascinating tale there's no need for embellishment anyway. MacGowan comes armed with amusing anecdotes. From the time he was told he'd go to hell for pushing his sister's face in a cow-pat to the occasion when he ate a Beach Boys album in the hope of persuading a Russian ambassador of the worthlessness of American imperialism.

There are tales of daubing the legend IRA on Elvis Costello's stage outfits on a joint tour, a youthful initiation ceremony that involved having a dustbin put on his head and banged solidly for half an hour, torturing kids at school by rubbing stinging nettles on their balls, and having sex on acid with a girl who kept changing colour like a chameleon. 

A good shag, apparently. Must try it. It's not the only story involving alcohol or recreational drugs. There's the time he took speed in a New Zealand hotel that had been built above a Maori burial site. Which resulted in MacGowan stripping naked and painting himself blue (I did wonder where he got hold of the paint). There's also the tale of a juvenile drunken escapade which ended with the young Shane talking to farmyard animals.

Which, of course, brings us to the subject that MacGowan himself claims to be incredibly bored off. His relationship with the drink. He started drinking and smoking at the age of four (which gave him more confidence when singing and dancing on the table, a party trick he'd got into a year earlier) and he'll freely admit that The Pogues played better when they were sober. Even if they enjoyed it more when they were drunk.

He talks of liking drinking cider on his own in the park. how interesting the lives and stories of 'dossers' are, and claims he had no self-destructive impulses whatsoever. That, if he had a death wish, he'd be dead. It's not that difficult. He also makes the point that it's up to him if he destroys his body and his life. It's his body and his life and it's his to do what he wants with.

Which is all true. While at the same time sounding very familiar to anyone who's lived with, or been close to, an alcoholic. A well practiced routine of jokes, denial, and acceptance that somehow shifts the conversation and provides no real insight into what makes MacGowan tick. If you come to Crock of Gold looking for insight you probably won't find that much.

If you want insight into MacGowan listen to the songs, read his poetic lyrics. In interview mode he can be defensive at times, highly amusing at others (he tells Depp he fell asleep watching Pirates of the Caribbean and jokes that life as a rent boy was simply about "the job in hand") and passionate when talking about both those he hates (Bob Geldof, the "boring" new romantics, and, surprisingly, W.B. Yeats who is dismissed as not a real Irishman but a "West Brit" and a "wanker") and those he loves.

In the credit ledger you'll find James Joyce, Graham Greene, Flann O'Brien, Karl Marx, the Marquis de Sade, Brendan Behan, Jimi Hendrix, and Creedence Clearwater Revival but you'll also find his family, his friends, and his girlfriend Victoria. It may often be blurred by booze and masked by ribald humour but MacGowan, ultimately, comes across as a lover not a fighter and as sure as he loves those close to him they clearly cherish him equally.

He was never really much of a pop star but he was, undoubtedly, the real deal. When a birthday tribute concert is not being ruined by Bono murdering one of his finest songs, you can see the love and affection that the likes of Nick Cave and Bobby Gillespie have for him. They know he's a poet, they know he's a rebel, and they know he's a free spirit. As much as Shane MacGowan loves the bottle, his own free spirit can never be bottled and all our cultural lives are richer for that. 

  

Classified Information:Behind the Scenes at the BBFC.

"Would you rather watch six hours of Teletubbies or six hours of porn?"

It's not a question I've ever heard asked before. Nor is it one I've ever pondered. But it was the final question of the Q&A section in last night's Skeptics in the Pub - Online talk, Ban this sick filth! Behind the scenes at the British Board of Film Classification, and it was one that former BBFC examiner and speaker Jim Cliff was unable to answer.

It was the only time in the evening Cliff struggled for words. A knowledgeable, articulate, and enthusiastic speaker, helmed by host Dave Jenkins of Coventry Skeptics, Jim Cliff began by taking us to Paris, back in May 1897. Eighteen months after the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louie, had staged the first public screening of a motion picture there was a charity event, the Bazar de la Charite, that ended in disaster and the loss of 126 lives when one of the key attractions, a cinematograph installation, caught fire.

Fires in the early days of cinema were not uncommon though rarely, if ever, this deadly. Two factors were at play. Firstly, cellulose nitrate - then used for film - was actually an explosive. Secondly, there were no custom cinemas yet built in those early days of the movies so films were screened in fairgrounds, shops, and, in Paris 1897, a large wooden warehouse decorated with cardboard and cloth.

This tragedy was still in the forefront of minds when, in 1909, in the UK, the Cinematograph Act was passed in which buildings that intended to show films to the public needed to be licensed. It seems that some councils chose to interpret this new law in more inventive ways than others and soon they were deciding not just where films could be shown but what films and when.

When, in 1912, the Daily Mail got its knickers in a twist about Sidney Olcott's From the Manger to the Cross, a film that told the life story of Jesus and received excellent reviews elsewhere, some got worried that the government would bow to pressure from the Mail and others and start intervening in film censorship. So one year later the industry formed its own board - the British Board of Film Censors - or BBFC.

Local councils were still ultimately in charge of what was, and wasn't, shown in their regions but, for the most part, decisions by the BBFC were simply rubber stamped - and that's still how it works today. For the most part. Exceptions are so noteworthy they become famous. Torbay Council banned Monty Python's Life of Brian from its release in 1979 until 2008 and David Cronenbourg's 1996 adaptation of J G Ballard's erotic psychological thriller Crash was banned by Westminster Council.

Forcing those who wanted to see it to walk nearly one hundred metres to the borough of Camden. These anomalies aside, things worked quite smoothly. Initially there were two categories for films. U for 'universal' - anyone could go to see it, and 'A' for adults - although still anyone could see those films too. The classifications were advisory only.

The release, and huge popularity, of James Whale's Frankenstein and Tod Browning's Dracula in 1931 caused a rethink and the next year a new H (for 'horrific') category was added. Decisions on what films were U, A, or H were, however, hardly scientific. They were made on the whims of examiners as were cuts to films and rejections of films outright.

Germaine Dulac's The Seashell and the Clergyman was a piece of experimental cinema, surrealist nonsense essentially but surrealist nonsense that was later recognised by the BFI as one of the most important feminist films ever made, but when the examiner saw it he decided that even though he had no idea what was going on, whatever was going on was probably objectionable.

 Joseph Brooke Wilkinson had been Director of the BBFC from its instigation in 1913 until he died in office in 1948 and was replaced by Arthur Watkins. Watkins' main concern, in the post-war era, was teenage violence and juvenile delinquency. He rejected Laszlo Benedek's 1953 The Wild One (with Marlon Brando) as a "spectacle of unbridled hooliganism".

It wasn't until 1967 that the film was certified for viewing by a British audience beyond specialist film societies. Under Watkins, the H category was replaced by X and became mandatory rather than advisory. Following Watkins in the job was John Trevelyan who held the position of Director from 1958 to 1971 and, unsurprisingly perhaps, he was in position throughout the entire sixties, he presided over an era of liberalisation.

Under Trevelyan, audiences were treated to the first use of the word 'fuck' in films (Joseph Strick's 1967 Ulysses, loosely based on the James Joyce book), the first full frontal female nudity (Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup, 1966), and the first full frontal male nudity (Ken Russell's Women in Love, a 1969 adaptation of the D.H.Lawrence novel).

Perhaps to facilitate this, you now had to be eighteen, rather than sixteen, to view an X certificate film. Two new categories were brought in as well. AA and PG. AA would be, roughly, a 15 rather than an 18 and PG stood for Parental Guidance. The next notable Director of the BBFC was James Ferman whose reign spanned two and half decades from 1974 to 1999.

A year before Ferman started the job, the Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon had started a Kung Fu craze and some of the weapons featured became, and remained for some of the time, popular with teenagers. Ferman introduced a blanket ban on both nunchucks and throwing stars in films. Even the scene in 1991's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II:Secret of the Ooze which featured Michelangelo using sausages as nunchuks was banned.

Ferman changed the C in BBFC from Censors to Classification and he brought in the system we still have now for ratings:- U, PG, 12, 15, and 18. Tim Burton's 1989 Batman being the first film to be awarded a 12 rating. The biggest change in Ferman's tenure though was, by far, the rise of the VCR. I can still remember the excitement when my dad brought our first Sony VCR back home and we slowed down Albert Tatlock on Coronation Street and made him walk backwards.

Not everyone's video fun was quite so innocent. With no restrictions on videos, soon films like 1980's Cannibal Holocaust were released. The makers of the film, looking to promote it as spectacularly as possible, sent a copy of the film, and a letter complaining about it, to Mary Whitehouse, the reactionary Christian activist who was a household name from the sixties to the eighties and railed against what she saw as falling standards in entertainment, social liberalism, and the permissive society.

They'd hoped, of course, to rile Whitehouse enough to get media coverage for their film and, to a degree, they succeeded. When Whitehouse was joined in her disapproval by another even more indefatigable campaigner for moral uprightness, the former Nazi supporting Daily Mail, the film, and others like it, became a major part of the national conversation.

The term 'video nasties' was coined, police raided video shops, seized video cassettes, and, in some cases, destroyed them. How it was decided which film was, or was not, a video nasty was unclear and most likely left to the whim of individuals. Which could not last. So, soon enough the BBFC started classifying videos too.

In 1999, Robin Duval took over as Chief Examiner at the BBFC and one of his first initiatives was to instigate a still ongoing public consultation process to find out what the public deemed offensive and what they deemed acceptable. These things are never static and the BBFC needed to move with the times. That could only be done with public consultation.

It was a smart move. When Jim Cliff joined, during this era, much of his training consisted of watching films that had set classification precedents and learning why they set those precedents. Parents, especially parents of small children, want to know what a U or PG film might feature and they need to be confident of consistency in the ratings.

Work, for Cliff and others, would consist of six hours randomly decided viewing each working day. An average day could see a session of Teletubbies, a session of pornography, a session of wrestling, and finally a few episodes of The X-Files. Almost all viewings would be done in pairs (potentially awkward with the grot) so that discussions could be had before final decisions were made.

Over the last twenty years, what we can see on our screens has been, for the most part, more overt. The only cuts made, now, for 18 certificate films are for scenes that break, or breach, the law. That's not always easily spotted. Pedro Almodovar's 2002 Talk to Her featured a bullfighting scene and though bullfighting is, sadly, legal in Spain, it is not in the UK. If you were to host, or partake in, a bullfight in the UK you would find yourself in fairly serious legal trouble.

A bullfight in the film would have been okay if Almodovar had simply filmed a bullfight in Spain and included it but because it appeared that the actress Rosario Flores had partaken in a bullfight specially for the film it fell foul of the censors. A cut was advised but Almodovar's team were able to get the decision reversed by proving that technology had been used to superimpose Flores' face on the face of an actual bullfighter. Bulls had been harmed but not to make the film. This fine point was enough to allow the scene to stand.

Sometimes nuance is even subtler. Alejandro Amenabar's 2001 film The Others was very creepy but it contained no sex or violence. It could have been a 15 as easily as it could a PG but was eventually passed as a 12 due to the 'tone' of the film. Tone is very important but it's hard to quantify. Some people are offended by swear words. Others couldn't care less.

The rule used to be you couldn't say 'fuck' in a PG film and one single f-bomb was permitted in a 12. Now, context is considered. The King's Speech (2010) sees Colin Firth stuttering out several 'fucks' but they're uttered in a non-aggressive way and are unlikely to offend or upset. The 1998 film version of The Avengers with Ranulph Fiennes and Uma Thurman was initially awarded a PG. They'd been hoping for a 12, they wanted at least some edge, so added a 'fuck' to the dialogue to get it bumped up.

Horror films that have not been scary enough to get an 18 rating have been known to throw in a gratuitous sex scene to get that all important X rating. Nobody, they wrongly imagine, wants to see a horror film that's got a 15 rating. Even though Poltergeist is a 15 (downgraded from an X) and is pretty damned creepy.

The on screen taking of drugs will get a film an 18 certificate if that drug taking is not seen to have a negative effect (quite unfair, drugs can be great fun). The 2003 Catherine Hardwicke film Thirteen featured a scene of solvent abuse in which nothing bad happened to either of the leads partaking so that, of course, had to be an 18.

Violence, too, has nuances when it comes to classification. Christopher Nolan's 2008 The Dark Knight featured lots of very impressionistic, cartoonish, violence that didn't look remotely real and couldn't realistically be copied by those viewing the film so it was given a 12 certificate. The Daily Mail (are you spotting a theme?) weren't happy and instigated a campaign of angry letters from their readers. Most of whom, of course, had not even seen the film.

Violence often comes hand in hand with gore and gore, too, relies on context. The Saw and Hostel films are almost pure gore and, of course, have 18 certificates but the silly, though very real, gore in Edgar Wright's 2007 Hot Fuzz was judged to be as comedic as it was horrific, bringing the rating down to a 15.

Another area of concern are 'imitable techniques'. That's things in films that, if you copied them, could be harmful to you and/or others. When David Fincher's Fight Club (1999) showed the audience how to make napalm it was fine. Because they showed the audience incorrectly. Another film that showed the audience the correct way to make napalm couldn't be allowed a release.

Which is fine. There are bound to be parts of the Internet where you can discover how to make weapons that can be used in terrorist acts but putting that up on the big screen for public entertainment isn't right. Although, in trying to doing the right thing in his job, Jim Cliff confesses, tongue only slightly in cheek, that he may have inadvertently been responsible for the Pizzagate shootings in Washington D.C.

These shootings were the result of a barmy conspiracy theory that claimed high ranking US politicians were abusing children in a basement of a pizza restaurant (a pizza restaurant, incidentally, that had no basement). When Cliff was certificating the Disney film Lilo & Stitch (2008) he noticed a scene where Lilo hides in a tumble drier.

Cognisant of the tragic fact that a small number of children die each year after somehow getting in tumble driers, Cliff advised a small change. When the film was released on Disney+, instead of hiding in a tumble drier, Lilo hid under a table and used a pizza box to cover the gap between the table legs. Conspiracy theorists don't need a lot of evidence (or, often, any) to 'prove' their theory true and this was enough.

Why had this, of all scenes, been cut? And replaced with, of all things, a reference to pizza? It could only mean that Disney were sending out a message that they were part of a global paedophile ring. Luckily, the anger went no further than a few blowhards shouting on the Internet for a few days (this time) but it shows the dangerous tightrope a film examiner walks.

A Q&A touched on the time consuming classification of video games, how boring classifying pornography is (it's 25% of the job and who would watch hours of it each day in their right mind?), subliminal messaging, depictions of Muhammed in film, and the sex references (designed to go above children's heads and straight to adults) that are slipped in to Carry On films, pantomimes, and Mrs Doubtfire.

People asked about the support networks and therapy that are available to people whose job may involve watching hours upon hours of sex, violence, or sexualised violence and though Jim Cliff said this can be a problem his worst two days at work were, it seems, having to turn away from a scene in Jackass where the cast intentionally give themselves paper cuts and, worse still, spending three entire working days watching the Blu-Ray of Pixar's Cars and wishing, instead, that he was watching something horrible and depraved.

An evening with Jim Cliff was anything but horrible and depraved and it was far more edifying than six hours of either pornography or Teletubbies. His job managed to sound simultaneously fascinating and also incredibly monotonous. It sounds like a job you'd not want to do for too many years but, for an evening in March, still in lockdown, sat at home, it was great entertainment. He used the word 'fuck' a few times but it was non-aggressive and as the 'tone' of the evening was jovial, I'll give it a 12 rating.

Men Against Boys:Football's Darkest Secret

"Men against boys"! It's what football fans say when one team rips another one apart but, in football - as elsewhere, there have been some men who despite in some ways being very obviously all FOR boys ended up ripping those boys' lives apart. These men used their privileged positions and status to abuse, rape, and threaten teen and pre-teen boys for decades and now, finally, after way too long, justice is finally being done.

Football's Darkest Secret (BBC1/iPlayer) is not an easy listen but it is a compelling one. Over three plus hours a selection of former professional footballers, former youth footballers, their mothers, detective inspectors of various constabularies, Daniel Taylor (chief football writer for The Guardian and The Observer), and Victoria Derbyshire, the radio broadcaster and former Newsnight and Panorama presenter, sketch out a story of sexual abuse and a story of misjustice as grave as any in modern British history.

It is, of course, emotional. Within three minutes one former footballer is in tears. He won't be the last. Either side of the television screen. While all sexual abuse is abhorrent and inexcusable, child sexual abuse is a particularly heinous crime. It casts a long dark shadow over the victim's life at a very early age and often that shadow, as brave testament tells us, never fully lifts.

Most men who have been abused as a child can't talk about it until they're in their forties. The shame, the stigma, the guilt, the embarrassment, and the emasculation that the perpetrator of the crime should experience has, it seems, been transferred into the victim. Incessant sustained sexual abuse, such as that suffered by those on Football's Darkest Secret, can, and does, alter a person's psyche. The irreparable damage done can result in self-medication, violence, criminality, inability to build or sustain personal relationships, suicidal ideation, and suicide.

One survivor, now in his sixties, still wonders if, somehow, he "deserved it". He knows he didn't but something still ticks away in the back of his mind even after justice has finally been served. In November 2016, Daniel Taylor was called to meet the former professional footballer Andy Woodward. Woodward had played in defence for Sheffield Utd, Crewe Alexandra, and Bury but it was not the relative merits of 3-5-2 versus 4-4-2 he wanted to talk about.

It was something quite different. Something shocking. Something had happened to Woodward as a boy. While a trainee at Crewe in the 80s, his youth football coach Barry Bennell had raped him. Not once but over three hundred times. Worse still, he was not the only one. Woodward told Taylor that there are hundreds of boys with the same, or similar, stories. Before revising that figure to thousands.

The next to come forward was Steve Walters, another former Crewe player, and then David White and Paul Stewart. White had played for Leeds Utd & Sheffield Utd, Stewart for Liverpool, Spurs, Crystal Palace, Sunderland, and Blackpool. Both had played for Man City and both had been capped for England. 

Their stories are those of working class, football mad, lads in the Manchester area catching the eyes of local talent scouts for teams and getting run outs for feeder clubs like Whitehill FC and Nova Juniors. The elite teams of that area's youth football scene. One of Whitehill's coaches was Barry Bennell and Bennell used his connections, unofficial but close enough to be able to provide kits etc;, to Man City to gain trust with the kids.

He'd been on Chelsea's books so he could play a bit too. Which also impressed the boys. So when he started inviting them to stay over at his house, for "homework", at weekends most of them were happy to do so. Even more so when they discovered his house was a treasure trove of then modern video games and VCRs. On which he'd show films like Nightmare on Elm Street to scare the boys so they moved closer to him.

The boys' parents had no reason to be suspicious and, even if they did, they didn't want to stand in the way of their child's dream. But when Bennell got the boys back to his house it wasn't long before he was sharing a bed with them, attempting to masturbate them, and getting them to masturbate him. Often he'd take two boys to bed with him at the same time. 

Sometimes the older one would be being phased out to make way for the younger one. Boys who refused overnight stays at Bennell's house were quickly moved out of the club and one boy, now a man, says he knew what Bennell was doing was wrong but didn't tell his dad because he knew his dad would be so angry that what he would probably kill Bennell and end up in prison.

Paul Stewart knew of Bennell's abuse not because Bennell had abused him. But because the man who abused him, Frank Roper - former head of Nova Juniors, told him so. Roper told Stewart he had to be receptive to his advances if he wanted to make it is a footballer and if Stewart said anything to his family he'd kill both his parents and both his sisters.

Roper tried to drive a wedge between Stewart and his family. He beat him, he abused him, and he raped him every day for four years. Being on the football pitch, Stewart recounts now, was the only time in his life he felt safe. His innocence, like the others, had been taken away forever.

In 1985, Bennell moved from Whitehill, thus severing his affiliation with Man City, and went to work under Dario Gradi at Crewe Alexandra. It was there he first came into contact with Andy Woodward. As he'd done with other families, Bennell ingratiated himself with Woodward's family and even, quite remarkably, married Woodward's sister.

A wedding Andy Woodward attended. He watched the man who'd raped him hundreds of times marry his own sister! Rumours about Bennell's behaviour was so rife that lads in opposing teams would call Woodward and others "Bennell's bum boys" but when complaints reached Dario Gradi, Crewe manager, and chairman John Bowler no action was taken.

Hardly any notice was taken. Steve Walters was one lad who did tell his dad but his dad took did nothing whatsoever and never mentioned it again. The lack of parental care, or even curiosity, on top of the abuse took its toll on Walters. His career stalled and he describes himself, now, as having gone off the rails.

He wasn't the only one. Despite scoring a Wembley goal in Tottenham's 1991 FA Cup Final against Nottingham Forest, and being widely seen as something of a happy go lucky joker, Paul Stewart was dying inside. He was self-medicating with alcohol, ecstasy, and cocaine and when he turned up for his first ever England team meeting he was drunk.

Perhaps it's why his international career stalled at three caps. He played twenty-six games for Liverpool while, at the same time, taking cocaine daily. We can never know for certain how bright Stewart's star may have shone had Bennell not destroyed him at such an early age. But we do know that Paul Stewart was far from the only victim of that era's football's predatory paedophiles.

When Woodward first spoke out, the NSPCC opened up a hotline which received fifty calls in the first two hours. Many of the calls were from former Southampton and Peterborough players and the name they kept mentioning was that of Bob Higgins who had been a coach at both those clubs.

Higgins had forced young players, including Matt Le Tissier, to line up for naked massages. Like Bennell he was a great football coach (given some credit for the development, on the pitch at least, of Le Tissier and Alan Shearer) and, like Bennell, he had boys stay over. Like Barry Bennell, he raped them.

Higgins seems to have run his youth teams like cults. Players would chant his name, write him love letters, admit to being infatuated, or even in love, with him. In his car, he'd play Lionel Richie and Whitney Houston's 'Greatest Love of All' and, while he did so, he'd force boys heads into his lap - sometimes for two hours at a time.

Even now some recall both the stench of urine and the feel of his erection through his trousers. Which didn't remain on once he got home. Like Bennell, he liked to masturbate in front of the boys and, like Bennell, he liked them to (try and) masturbate in front of him. When his behaviour drew attention to him and senior figures at Southampton questioned him, he angrily resigned and threatened future litigation before moving to Peterborough and carrying on just as he had done at Southampton.

In 1994, Bennell was arrested in Florida for six counts of sexual battery. He had taken the Staffordshire youth side he was then coaching, Stone Dominoes, on an American tour and a thirteen year old boy had reported that Bennell had sexually abused him. Bennell was jailed in America but the case barely registered back in the UK. Raping children, apparently, not a big deal in the Cool Britannia era.

Bennell received a four year sentence for which he served less than two and, back in the UK, two years later, Channel 4's Dispatches ran an expose on both Bennell and Higgins in which one of Bennell's victims, the brave and articulate Ian Ackley, came forward. Dispatches was not shy in saying that these men and others had raped children. Football turned a blind eye and hoped it would go away.

Which it did. There was no media storm (as many had expected), there was no action taken, and some of those who had spoken out found themselves shunned by certain sections of society. Even David White and Andy Woodward, when asked about Bennell, defended him. The shame and, for Woodward, the family situation no doubt informing their decision.   

In 1998, Barry Bennell did receive a nine year sentence at Chester Crown Court when he pleaded guilty to twenty-three of forty-five offences. As one survivor put it, that's less than one day in prison for every rape he committed. Bennell was in prison serving a surprisingly lenient sentence considering the severity and number of his crimes, Higgins was still free, and, in Newcastle, so was George Ormond.

Former Newcastle player Derek Bell picks up the story at the start of the new millennium. Bell, who had left football by then and was working with young and vulnerable asylum seekers, one night noticed a shady figure hiding in the bushes looking to befriend the young boys arriving in Britain. Bell knew straight away that it was George Ormond because Bell had been a victim of Ormond as a young player at the Montagu and North Fenham boys club in the 70s.

Ormond, unlike some of the others, appears to have had no real interest in, or skill for, football. He simply used it as a vehicle to satisfy his lust. He'd abuse children in their own homes and then laugh and joke with the parents minutes later as if nothing had happened. Bell, like so many victims - tortured by his demons, was drinking heavily at the time and one night, fuelled by rightful anger and booze, he went to Ormond's house with a 12" knife to stab him. Luckily for both of them, Ormond was not in. Days later, Bell returned and this time instead of a knife he hid a tape recorder inside his jacket.

Ormond let him in and, on tape, confessed to his crimes. Bell took the recording to the police and Ormond was jailed for six years for a series of sexual abuse crimes against at least nineteen minors spanning twenty-five years. But Bennell and Ormond were seen as individual cases, not part of a much wider problem. 

When Bob Higgins appeared in court in Salisbury in 2018 (following four days of police interviewing in which he refused to utter a single word) he denied all charges and also denied he'd ever been alone with a child in his car (which would have been very unusual in his line of work) but he did admit to getting an erection while massaging boys. 

When the jury took a long time reaching the verdict, the prosecution knew that this meant there was at least one person on that jury who didn't believe Higgins was guilty and, sure enough, the verdicts were, for the most part, inconclusive. Higgins was found guilty on one count of indecent assault, not guilty on one similar charge, and the jury failed to reach a verdict on a forty-eight similar charges. Many others were not even brought to trial.

Higgins' victims became despondent, suicidal even. Bennell, who by that point was using the name Richard Jones, was another who only faced trial for a small number of his crimes. Hundreds of his victims had come forward but most didn't reach court as it was feared that the sheer number was too much for a jury to take in and may in some way have prejudiced the case.

It seemed to many of the victims that football, the FA, were now making the right noises and, in extreme and obvious cases, taking some action. But still nowhere near enough. Most authority figures didn't want to get involved but one MP, Bambos Charalambous (Labour, Enfield Southgate) did take up the case and raised it as a political issue.

When Bob Higgins found himself in court again, in 2018, accused of fifty-one charges of indecent assault, it was the absolute last chance for justice to be done and, finally, it was. Higgins, like Ormond, was found guilty of many many charges (though, in the case of Ormond, not for raping an eighteen year old boy, Dion Raitt - another who bravely spoke out. Not because the jury believed that Raitt consented to sex with Ormond but because they believed that Ormond thought he did - which you'd like to think wouldn't stand up in a rape case).

They were sentenced to over twenty years each and Bennell was found guilty on another fifty counts of sexual abuse and sentenced to another thirty years. Since he's been in prison, further victims have come forward and further guilty verdicts have been reached.

The abusers, these ones at least, are now in prison and are unlikely to ever walk free again. But the chances missed, the times the victims were ignored, means that these monsters were at liberty not for weeks, months, or years but for decades. Football's Darkest Secret raises questions about our judicial system and also about the power structures inherent both within the game and within society.

Did the courts, did football, did we all turn a blind eye, ignore it, deny it, and trivialise it because it was convenient to do so. If that's the case and I don't believe there can be any doubt that it is, then that is the perfect example of systemic institutionalised failure on the part of the football authorities to deal with a problem that completely ruined hundreds, thousands, of young boy's lives.

The full FA acknowledgement of that systemic institutionalised failure came just over a week ago - on the 17th March 2021. That alone is absolutely shocking. The story that Andy Woodward, Steve Walters, Ian Ackley, Dean Radford, David White, Paul Stewart, Derek Bell, Gary Johnson, David Eatock and others told was deeply disturbing but it is one we cannot ignore. One we should never had ignored.

These men who abused them are barely worthy of the word 'men'. They willingly ruined boys lives purely to sate their own basest desires. These were men who were, very much, AGAINST, boys. That many of those boys have grown up to be far finer men than their abusers is, to me, a triumph. But without justice that triumph would have remained hollow.