A novel look at Clough's reign at Leeds

RICHARD Moore

The South Bank Show,
ITV1, tomorrow

PEOPLE always say it started with Nick Hornby. That, with his book Fever Pitch, Hornby reclaimed football from the masses, intellectualising it, or at least discussing it using words of more than one syllable and phraseology more sophisticated than "one game at a time" and "it's all about sticking the ball in the back of the net, at the end of the day".

Now Melvyn Bragg, who along with Stephen Fry and Pat Nevin is universally recognised as one of the country's foremost intellectuals, has muscled in on the act. Football is being given the South Bank Show treatment tomorrow, with Bragg's high-brow arts programme turning its thoughtful gaze, specifically, to David Peace's The Damned United, a fictionalised account of Brian Clough's tempestuous 44 days as manager of Leeds United.

The programme features a cast of talking heads, from the tiresome Eamon Dunphy to the national treasure that is Michael Parkinson. And there is Peace himself – a gangly, awkward Yorkshireman in black-rimmed specs, who reads profanity-peppered passages from his book and seeks to explain himself – and his controversial book – to Bragg.

For what it's worth, I think Peace's book is a brilliant, vivid portrayal of Clough – or, more accurately, of the inner workings of his troubled mind. Dunphy, despite confessing that he couldn't put it down, decided on reflection that he didn't like it, dismissing it as a "caricature". Parkinson likes it, though with reservations. Bragg also likes it. The Clough of the book, he points out, "belongs to the gritty, dark world of David Peace" – in other words, it isn't necessarily the 'real' Clough, but the product of the author's imagination.

Then again, what does 'real' mean? Asked why he chose to write a novel rather than a work of non-fiction, Peace argues that "there is no such thing as non-fiction. If you're going to write a biography you're not going to write a minute-by-minute account; you're going to have to make subjective decisions about the moments you write about. I see all writing as fiction." To describe The Damned United as fiction is, says Peace, "more honest" than the biographer who describes his account is definitive.

And, of course, it also permits a lot more freedom than for the biographer constrained by the inconvenient 'truth'. But – and this is where Parkinson has difficulties – there is an inherent problem in fictionalising the lives of real, and especially still living, people. Johnny Giles, depicted by Peace as a manipulative character who helped hasten Clough's exit from Leeds, was particularly aggrieved. He sued Peace and his publishers for libel and won "substantial damages" earlier this year.

Clough's family isn't too pleased, either. His widow, Barbara, released a statement describing her late husband as nothing like Peace's depiction of him as an alcohol-fuelled paranoid psychological basket case, but "considerate and civilised," adding that "behind the façade of bravado he was a deep thinking man."

How does Peace feel about this? A minor frustration of tomorrow's programme is that Bragg doesn't ask, so we don't find out. True, Peace might not like to be drawn into the debate, reasoning that, as a novelist, he is under no obligation to explain or justify his fictional 'characters' – or there could be legal reasons for the programme avoiding certain issues.

Otherwise, tomorrow's programme, apart from its discussion of The Damned United, claims to "examine the issue of why in the UK, unlike America, it's so unusual to write seriously about sport in general and football in particular".

Yet apart from some amusing anecdotes from Parkinson, and some nonsense from Dunphy – who suggests that, in order to write well about football, you need to have played at a high level – it doesn't really delve very deeply into a subject that is certainly worthy of examination.

And perhaps worthy of a separate South Bank Show, with real intellectuals – poets and playwrights rather than ex-footballers and retired talk show hosts – jousting with Bragg on what sport means?

After all, sport seems increasingly to interest artists and intellectuals, from Peace himself to Turner prize winner Douglas Gordon's film on Zinedine Zidane, to a recent rant from Germaine Greer on the blurred lines between "high" and popular culture.

Football, said Greer, is just as valid and meaningful a cultural activity as the opera, before going on to claim that the quality of writing on the sports pages frequently knocks the socks off the stuff that appears elsewhere in newspapers.

Good old Germaine – why wasn't she invited on tomorrow's South Bank Show?