From time to time in this job, an offer of extracurricular work in the role of a talking head on a TV show or documentary presents itself. It is a measure of the extremely high regard in which I am held in the sportswriting and broadcasting business that the handful to have found their way into my inbox tend to be at the snake-belly lowbrow end of the spectrum. While more exalted and successful colleagues in possession of far more intellectual heft tend to turn up on heavyweight productions about Ayrton Senna, Lionel Messi or Paul Gascoigne, my invitations tend to be restricted to shows destined to be forever repeated on a late-night Dave loop. All filler and very little killer, they tend to involve the discussion of blunders and bloopers, or simply remembering things. Due in no small part to my inherent laziness coupled with a dread of appearing on television born of extreme self-consciousness, they are invariably rejected out of hand.
Earlier this year, however, I was made an offer I found difficult to refuse. Out of the blue in January, a man named Ben Hirsch made contact to enquire about the possibility of interviewing me for a documentary he was making about the famously reclusive and publicity-shy former England football international Peter Crouch. A director with Workerbee, a northern-based production company that, by its own account, specialises in “gripping and globally reaching stories that fascinate and entertain”, Ben quickly sold me on the idea of participating in a film documenting the process in which a conspicuously lanky and gawky child apparently blessed with all the physical coordination of a tangled Slinky stuck halfway down the stairs had triumphed over apparently insurmountable God-given adversity to reach the higher echelons of his profession as an elite footballer, becoming a much-loved household name and media personality in the process.
There were multiple enticements. Well, three to be precise. I have always admired Peter Crouch as a footballer and a man, and was confident, given his participation in the documentary, that I was not being invited to be an unwitting accomplice in some sort of hit job. The mention of a generous fee that prompted a sharp but hopefully inaudible intake of breath on my part also helped. What sealed the deal was a cast-iron assurance that, if I could help secure the loan of the premises for a morning’s worth of filming, I would be forced to travel no further than the pub around the corner from my house to film my contribution to what sounded like it might be a worthwhile addition to the canon of sports documentaries that are well worth watching.
This was important, because unlike many of my fellow talking heads in the documentary, my personal finances do not stretch to a marble-topped kitchen island the size of Ibiza against which I could lean while making banal observations about the huge number of football clubs Peter Crouch had played for by the age of 25. For his part, director Ben seemed happy to conduct our business at an old school, last-of-a-dying-breed backstreet Brixton boozer with a certain “rustic” appeal. Specifically: three TVs, a jukebox, pool table and dartboard, not to mention a heroically resolute refusal in the face of modern consumerism to accept payments from customers by card.
A date was set, a loose line of questioning discussed and I set about judiciously revisiting the life’s work of a beanpole striker whose father once pinned a colleague against a bathroom wall at a World Cup for constantly referring to his boy by what he perceived to be derogatory adjectives such as “beanpole”.
This research would prove very important. Turning up on the agreed morning, what I had expected to be a breezy to and fro lasting no more than 20 minutes turned out to be an intensive inquisition of almost three hours’ duration. It began around 11am and by 2pm, bemused early afternoon regulars peering in the window at the designated pub opening time were treated to the sight of the Workerbee crew packing up their gear. Sitting on a high stool, slumped against the bar, this shaking, sweat-sodden husk sat clutching a restorative and righteous pint, having provided more platitudinous and vapid insight into the career of Peter Crouch than any unfit, overweight, middle-aged talking head novice should ever reasonably be expected to impart.
Needless to say, almost all of it ended up on the cutting room floor and, watching That Peter Crouch Film upon its release earlier this week, it gradually occurred to me that my contribution might have been so lame that I would suffer the ignominy of not actually making the edit at all. No such luck; I eventually turned up at the 24-minute mark and appeared sporadically thereafter to offer the searingly hot takes that playing elite level football is quite difficult, the doubly deflected strike against Wigan with which Crouch eventually broke his Liverpool duck was “the shittest goal I’ve ever seen”, and that over the years, as we got to know Peter Crouch, the player has become “almost a national treasure”. This is why I got paid the big bucks, although I suspect fellow guest contributors such as Steven Gerrard, Harry Redknapp and Abbey Clancy, all of whom benefit from having at least actually met or even slept with Peter Crouch, almost certainly got paid much more.
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As a minor participant in the production, it is not really my place to say whether That Peter Crouch Film is any good or not, although I enjoyed it and given its subject it is no great surprise to see it has been very warmly received by the Guardian and elsewhere. As a sufferer of impostor syndrome whose toes have yet to uncurl several days after watching the documentary and more specifically my small role in it, my only suggestion might be that it could have been hugely improved by the presence of a little more Crouchy and a lot less me.
