England’s most naturally gifted modern-day footballer should be thinking about glory, now; remembering the goals and the touch that often made him unplayable.
But Paul Gascoigne is still so damaged that he couldn’t even enter the room where a documentary on his life was screened this week.
He arrived as scheduled at the Charlotte Street Hotel in Soho on Thursday lunchtime, although he did not show up for a scheduled Q&A with presenter Manish Bhasin, after a BBC screening.
The explanation was that he “just didn’t feel up to it” because everything was still “too raw for him”.
But the clips – which end the two documentary films – of Gascoigne walking in his fishing gear near his home tell all about the great football and stardom taken. He looks incredibly emaciated and barely recognizable.
There’s also a painful sadness about the end credits, stating that Gascoigne – who always craves company – now lives “alone in the south of England”.
‘I don’t like being alone. When you’re alone, you think a lot,” he says in one of the many clips the films collect.
Gascoigne’s collapse into a life of relentless chaos is so familiar that the story of how and why it happened has been lost.
There was the alcohol, of course. Even on the eve of squad selection for the 1998 World Cup squad, he downed pina coladas and performed performances of My Way at the England Hotel, with manager Glenn Hoddle in attendance , who quickly omitted it.
But the films, directed by Sampson Collins, recall the brutal celebrity storm in which Gascoigne found himself at the center of the late 1980s, when his explosive, sometimes violent relationship with Sheryl Failes – whom he married – became the main commodity in a tabloid circulation was.
Desperate photographers hid in car trunks and rigged taxi ranks to take pictures of him drunk. His phone was hacked three or four times a day, one of the authors told the filmmakers.
Desperate photographers hid in car trunks and rigged taxi ranks to take pictures of him drunk. His phone was hacked three or four times a day, one of the authors told the filmmakers.
But the intimate relationship News of the World’s Rebekah Wade and the Mirror’s Piers Morgan carefully cultivated with the player’s girlfriend made subterfuge hardly necessary. They knew all of Gascoigne’s missteps. “It was sad but it was a character story for the newspapers,” Morgan said at the time.
If all this had happened now, Gascoigne would have had weapons at his disposal; communications staff to move him away from some of these places and put him by his side.
But in Gascoigne’s world, cameras materialized on planes, in nightclubs, in his driveway, and he was left to deal with them alone, often in a wacky fashion.
In the second of the films, an argument with paparazzi outside his house escalates into him “threatening” to face them at football on his lawn – “me versus you” – which seems to be his only recourse. A ball is produced, which he throws into a pond. The predators film themselves happily retrieving it and can hardly believe their luck.
Gascoigne’s personal assistant, Jane Nottage, writes a book about him, after their split, revealing intimate details about his eating disorder.
The FA gave him advice, but only after he was accused of hitting his wife. But, back when mental health didn’t seem like a concept, there’s not the slightest sense of 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 playing in the background. “By the way, it’s me dad who snores,” says Gascoigne. “Happy to think about his next pint, wondering where it came from.”
The so-called friends who shot his fame and won their own fame are no longer with Gascoigne now. Jimmy Five Bellies would not cooperate with the filmmakers.
Gascoigne’s “advisers” in recent years have not even bothered to give him all the information about the BBC film project. The idea only caught on when he parted ways with them.
It’s surprising that the filmmakers didn’t put Gascoigne on camera and ask for his testimony. The option was offered to them; he gave his blessing to this project and encouraged his family to provide images.
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