Gazza is a two-part, two-hour long documentary about Paul Gascoigne, the alchemical talent turned cautionary tale. But the real Gazza - the now 54-year-old retired footballer with no light behind his eyes - doesn’t appear on camera for longer than 90 seconds, and at least half of those are silent shots of him, stiff and lumbering in fisherman’s waders, walking to the shallows of a Hampshire fishing lake.
Instead, Gazza is a tale told almost exclusively through archival footage, through the lenses that watched the real Gazza for a decade as he transformed from cheeky wunderkind to the punchline of a boorish joke sold to us by the red top press. This feels both entirely fitting and wholly unsatisfactory: Gazza’s story was never really his own to tell. Why would he get his shot now?
