Floodlights is a harrowing watch, even if you allow for its subject matter: the sexual abuse of boys on an industrial scale by football coach Barry Bennell. For anyone with sensibility it will be, I’m afraid to say, all too much. Bennell was a prominent football scout and coach in the northwest from the 1970s to the 2000s; the full extent and detail of his crimes will probably never be known. Partly that’s because not all of those who may have been abused are still alive, but also because others, even now, wish to try to bury and forget their experiences. Currently serving a long prison sentence, Bennell was plainly a prolific offender.
One of his victims – and the focus of this dramatisation – was Andy Woodward. He was a young, highly talented defender that Bennell had talent-spotted for Crewe Alexandra in the 1980s, and who went on to be a successful professional player. Over the course of some years, he was treated as nothing more than a sexual slave by Bennell. Woodward is portrayed with an almost unbearable sense of loss by Max Fletcher as a teenager, and by Gerard Kearnes as a grown man. The cold, brutal details of Bennell’s crimes are brought home in the simple scene where the older Woodward, at last feeling able to speak to the police, lists the offences in legal terms in his damning witness statement, including French kissing, molestation, oral sex and rape on a daily basis. We obviously see no representation of these on screen; it is distressing enough to see Bennell (Jonas Armstrong) manipulating, threatening and bribing those children into his home and his bed. When we see Andy trembling as the naked Bennell gets into the bed, we know all too clearly what will happen next, though we don’t see it. It is chilling, and repulsive.
