Best and the worst of times

Later I worked in his hometown, Belfast, and for the tabloid reporters the instruction they feared most came when Best had done something exciting, like getting a new girlfriend, or missing a train — he was the Jade Goody of his day, except that in those days celebrities usually had a talent of some kind — and they were ordered to the Protestant estate where his family lived to ask his mother for a comment. They were generally greeted by a tirade of drunken and foul-mouthed abuse, which was unusual, since the people of Northern Ireland are the most courteous in the UK, except when they’re trying to kill you.

What we didn’t realise till later was that his mother, Ann, had the alcoholic gene which she passed on to her son. It wasn’t triggered until she was in her forties and she took a small sherry at the christening of her youngest child. It was the first drink she’d ever had. George was already whooping it up in the stews and flesh pots of Manchester, skipping training, missing games, leaving a trail of bottles around his house.

The play caught the elegiac mood perfectly; the warm, poised, competent mother reduced to an incapable harridan, the controlling father desperately trying to cope with a wife and a son suddenly beyond that control, and the boy’s talent spluttering and disappearing like a roman candle in the rain. At the age of 27 he retired, pissed. She had died when she was 54. It was a beautifully judged programme and dreadfully, unbearably sad.