This investigation into the crimes of Barry Bennell and others is unsensational, compassionate and necessary, and the courage of those who came forward shines through
I once – walking through London, not very late at night – came across a man holding fast to a woman’s wrist and setting a dog on her. A crowd was already there, the police already on their way and, as I halted and stared in horror, a fire engine that happened to be passing stopped, and its crew got out and started to intervene. Among the many thoughts I had in the 90 seconds or so that I listened to her screams and watched her flail, silhouetted against the streetlights and lights of the cars streaming past us all, was how much of a lie it gave to what drama presents us as truth. The timbre of her voice, the abandonment terror gave her movements were unmistakably real and irreproducible – the best attempts from actors, you suddenly saw, were the very faintest, palest facsimiles of the real, awful thing.
The same thought passed through my mind as the camera trained itself on the men testifying to their horrifying truths in the three-part documentary series Football’s Darkest Secret (BBC One), about the sexual abuse of young boys by paedophile coaches. The episode titles give you the trajectory – The End of Silence, Missed Opportunities and The Reckoning. The interviewees give you the detail, beginning – as the eventual, ever-widening investigation itself did – with the former footballer Andy Woodward. In November 2016, he went to the police to report being raped and abused for years as a trainee at Crewe Alexandra in the 1980s by the then coach Barry Bennell.
