Marvellous was simply magnificent television

TV Watch with Dave O’Connell

Once in a blue moon, television unexpected throws up a rare gem of a drama – and the BBC Two managed that with Marvellous last week.

Quite simply, there will not be a better hour and a half of drama on the box this year.

Marvellous did many things because it was beautifully made, but most of all it actually achieved the impossible – it restored your faith in the world of professional football.

It told the true story of Neil Baldwin, a man who has what are commonly referred to as ‘learning difficulties’ who goes on to carve out a unique double role for him as an unpaid advisor to students at Keele University . . . and kit man for Stoke City FC.

It was the docu-drama style, the quality of the acting, but most of all, the stranger than fiction story that lifted the soul and produced 90 minutes of the most compulsive viewing you are ever likely to see.

Neil was played by acclaimed actor Toby Jones, but he also featured as himself, as though this was a series of flashbacks through his life.

And what a life – a man whose innocence shone through simply refused to see barriers and thus became a circus clown, inveigled his way into a lifelong role as a university mentor and then topped it off with his dream job at his beloved Stoke City.

Former Potters manager – and Manchester United and Scotland star of the past – Lou Macari also featured as himself but he was also portrayed with eerie accuracy by Tony Curran.

Macari gave Neil the role of kit-man after he found him waiting outside the club’s stadium all day. And it was Macari – who has famously described Neil as his best-ever signing – who made his dream come true by allowing him to come on as a substitute striker in a testimonial against Aston Villa.

If this sounds like the stuff of dreams – or indeed fantasy – then the story of Neil Baldwin is all of that.

And award-winning writer Peter Bowker joined with Julian Farino – best known as executive producer on the smash HBO hit Entourage – to do it every justice.

The wonder really is that they crammed it all into a documentary the length of a football match and yet it still captured all of the layers and drama of a wonderful man’s life story.

But he was also beautifully played by Toby Jones, who was equally convincing on the big screen in the recent past as Alfred Hitchcock.

He never overacted or resorted to cliché – and the dynamic between ‘Neil’ and his devoutly Christian, widowed, elderly mother, Mary (played by Gemma Jones) was wonderfully realistic.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.