John DeLorean: man of mystery – and full-blown psychopath

DeLorean: Back from the Future was one of those documentaries — for me at least — that takes a story you thought you sort of knew and makes you realise a) that you didn’t really, and b) what a great story it is.

The programme began, as it was pretty much duty-bound to, with a clip of Michael J. Fox and the time-travelling DeLorean car from the movie that inspired Wednesday’s means-less-the-more-you-think-about-it subtitle. A series of captions then introduced us to John DeLorean himself: a man who ‘had everything’ (cue shots of a much younger ex-model wife and some Rolexes) until he ‘risked it all’ in the mid-1970s, when he left a high-ranking post at General Motors to found his own sports-car company. Now all he needed was the money.

Luckily, the British government was happy to help. Having failed to secure a deal in the Republic of Ireland, whose party-pooping ministers actually checked up on his claim to have 30,000 advance orders, DeLorean was given around £54 million to set up in Belfast — almost every mention of which the programme illustrated with a handy montage of explosions.

As we saw, his new factory was reported on for the BBC by a curly-haired young scamp called Jeremy Paxman. (Looking back on DeLorean now, Paxo seemed particularly outraged that ‘a man with perfect teeth’ should have shown up in Belfast at all.) It was also one of the few places in the city where Catholics and Protestants mingled, although something both sides of the workforce did have in common was that they’d never made cars before. Nor did DeLorean take a hands-on approach — preferring, perhaps understandably, to spend a fair amount of his British government money on the New York highlife.