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Screen Break
Car park love - the strange case of Stan Collymore
By martin kelner
Sep 3, 2006 - 10:51:00 AM

What next for Stan Collymore? The question was forming in my mind towards the end of a programme called My Childhood on BBC3, when suddenly the answer popped up on screen. Next: Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps.

A little modest, I thought, for a millionaire ex-footballer whose normal routine when bearded by the black dog of despair is to shove off to Australia for a couple of months of light scuba diving; but naturally the slogan referred not to the troubled former international striker, but to the following programme, the monumentally witless “comedy” show (four series, one joke), intended one suspects to lighten the mood in some mysterious way after an hour of Stan in the psychiatrist’s chair.

Mental illness, of course, is no laughing matter – something it has in common with Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps – but sometimes it is difficult to take Stan entirely seriously, or at least as seriously as he takes himself.

Maybe we are just a little too familiar with Stan’s inner demons. I don’t know who is handling the PR for those I.Ds, but in recent years they seem to have had more airtime than Carol Vorderman, as a result of which we know all about Stan’s depression, the weeks he was unable to get out of bed, and the lack of sympathy and understanding he encountered in the macho world of professional football.

In My Childhood, Stan was encouraged to trace his problems back to his early years by psychiatrist Dr Linda Treliving. The sweetly sympathetic Dr Treliving, whom one imagines Stan found more gemutlich than some of the central defenders he came across on a Saturday afternoon in the Premiership, is an expert in early trauma, of which Stan could claim barrow loads.

His largely absent Barbadian father, a journalist from whom Stan possibly inherited the plausibility the late Nicholas Tomalin reckoned was one of the essential tools of our trade, was in the habit of turning up out of the blue to give Doreen, Stan’s mum, a good hiding, leaving her understandably a bundle of anxieties, many of which little Stan took on his own shoulders. Once Collymore Senior flew off to Barbados with his latest girlfriend and five-year-old Stan in tow, after telling Doreen he was just taking the boy to London for the weekend.

The programme combined Stan’s sessions with the Doc with a This Is Your Life element in which the patient wandered the not particularly mean but rather uninspiring streets of his native Cannock, meeting childhood friends, chatting to former teachers and so on.

Alongside Stan’s early trauma, the more recent nightmares – signing for Leicester City, going out with Davina McCall – were rehearsed, and I do not intend to give them more currency here, except to endorse the popular view that nothing he has been through excuses his despicable behaviour towards Ulrika Jonsson in 1998, and also to observe in passing that if it weren’t for dogging and piking many of the car parks in our areas of outstanding natural beauty would remain sadly neglected.

Stan, Dr Treliving and her colleagues concluded, has Borderline Personality Disorder, requiring anti-depressants and daily psychotherapy for up to two years. Therapy is a long-term commitment – as Woody Allen says in Annie Hall, “the therapy is going really well, they reckon in six months time I should be able to take the lobster bib off” - which is clearly as alien to Stan as a quiet night in with a plate of chocolate hob nobs and Holby City on the telly. Sure enough, by the end of the show Stan had set off round the world again “hoping that will bring him some happiness.”

As previously indicated, one does not wish to make light of mental illness, not in real life anyway, so thank goodness for Footballers’ Wives, in which, I feel absolutely safe in saying, all the characters are as barmy as badgers.

It was actually possible to flip straight from Stan’s analysis to that of Amber Gates, whose husband Conrad was murdered in the last series by Earls Park team-mate and captain Bruno Milligan. Amber is even more reluctant than Stan to embrace the world of psychotherapy, flouncing out on her shrink, saying, “Jesus, I thought I was the one with the mental problems,” one of many rich insults adorning episode one of the new series.

Earls Park’s exciting new midfield signing Tremaine Gidigbi, played by Chucky Venice – the only actor in the show whose real name is possibly more outrageous than his character’s – is said by Bruno to be “so full of shit you could fertilize the pitch with it,” although my favourite line comes after the obligatory cat-fight between two of the wives, when one laments, “She’s ruined mi bleedin’ Versacci.”

By the way, feel free to disagree with any of the above. I got an entertaining email this week from one Kirsty Edwards taking me to task for my recent dismissal of her “favourite reality TV programme,” Dancing On Ice. She says she is annoyed by the negative tone of my piece, accuses me of poverty of imagination, and one of the jokes I was quite pleased with she describes as “somewhat pathetic and not amusing.” Mystifyingly, she signs off with a kiss.

One of her comments struck home, though. Kirsty asks if I have nothing better to do than “sit around eating pizza on your own, watching programmes you don’t like.” Bloody hell, bang to rights.


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