Going for Gold is a biographical drama about a forgotten star of the 1970s. Frankie Lucas was a middleweight boxing champion, born on the Caribbean island of St Vincent, who won a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in 1972. Although he lived in London he wasn’t picked for the England team and instead he wore the colours of his native land. He did them proud.
Frankie Lucas seems to have spent 42 years sitting in a council flat, smoking weed and sulking
The script, by Lisa Lintott, emphasises Lucas’s virtues and downplays his rackety personal life and his habit of smoking bales of cannabis on a regular basis. His non-stop intake of marijuana makes his sporting success all the more remarkable, but this show wants to sanitise its subject rather than presenting him as a flesh-and-blood character in a gripping drama.
The most promising incidents occur off stage. We hear that Lucas was tricked into throwing a fight against Alan Minter, the future world champion, but the facts aren’t properly developed and the details remain murky. Ditto the rumours of an unsupervised punch-up in a dressing room which ended with Lucas beating a rival boxer unconscious. What happened there? It sounds fascinating but the truth is discreetly withheld.
The low-budget production scrapes by with scout-hut decorations and charity-shop costumes. Much of the dialogue is drowned out by overloud reggae music, and the actors fail to compensate by raising their voices. Jazz Lintott plays Lucas as a surly, muttering loner which seems about right. Llewella Gideon, as his wife Gene, speaks many of her lines in a whisper so her story is hard to follow.
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