“It’s going to be tough” says Barry Bennell to his excited young protege Andy Woodward. “But trust in me and you can go from £20 a week to two grand.” For a lad from early-80s Stockport whose mum is having to do shifts at the local chippy because his dad is out of work, that’s a big deal. But, as any kid with an unlikely dream would know, the money is only a tiny part of it. Really, it’s about the glory; about covering your bedroom wall with posters of footballers and wondering if you could be like them. That’s what the Crewe Alexandra youth coach was promising. And, as a coach reputed to be the best in the country, he had delivered on such promises before. He was, as he styled himself, the Star Maker.
The reality, of course, was more horrific than anyone could have imagined. In 2016, by now in his early 40s, Woodward shared his story with the Guardian journalist Daniel Taylor. In doing so, he opened the floodgates. Bennell had been a serial sex abuser with hundreds of young victims. In telling his story under his own name and on his own terms, Woodward opened up a space for others. Soon, the endemic abuse at the heart of Britain’s national game became clear. It wasn’t just Woodward and it wasn’t just Bennell. The story’s actual dimensions were almost too huge to contemplate.
BBC Two’s exceptional, harrowing new drama Floodlights brings it back to basics. In doing so, it humanises the tragedy behind each one of those cases. Speaking over Zoom, Woodward recalls its origins. “I was very gripped by the film Spotlight,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s a brilliant film … but it’s all about the journalists. And I watched it and thought: ‘What about the victims’ perspective? Where are they in all this?’” Woodward had already written a book, 2019’s Position of Trust, about the effect the abuse had on his life. But he wondered: could the impact be brought home even more emphatically?
Woodward started working with the screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh on a project that would tell the story from the point of view of a victim of child abuse. “The key is to find that emotional history,” says Greenhalgh. “We spent three days talking and I asked targeted questions. What I didn’t want to do was say: ‘Tell us about your abuse.’ Because that would have been painful for everybody involved. So I decided on the story structure then asked lots of questions that hopefully meant his answers would inform the writing process. I’ll never forget those three days, and I’m sure he won’t, either.”
But did Greenhalgh feel pressure? To commit to such a raw, highly charged project is to take on huge responsibility. “When you imbibe the tragedy of Andy’s story, it becomes quite personal,” he says. “And when you can’t shake it off, that’s when you know you’ve got to do the story. Once I’d made the decision to do it, the pressure was a privilege.”
The film’s extensive gestation period (the project began pre-Covid) has paid off in spades. Everything rings true – at times, grotesquely so. Bennell (played by Jonas Armstrong) is astonishingly, authentically repulsive: wheedling, bantering, manipulating, terrifyingly changeable in tone and mood; playing his young charges off against each other; and exploiting his gatekeeping power and sinister charisma to the full. “How he did that, I don’t know,” says Woodward. One real-life subplot hasn’t been included: the extraordinary fact that Bennell married Woodward’s sister before the truth about his crimes came out (“We could have ended up making three films,” says Woodward). “When my sister watched it, she was really poorly afterwards because he’s that like him. I don’t think Jonas even realises how powerful it is.”
But, of course, Floodlights is not really about Bennell. Instead, the emotional core is provided by teen actor Max Fletcher, who brilliantly animates the young Andy. Woodward describes himself as “loving and soft-natured” and Fletcher’s performance captures that, radiating a heartbreaking innocence that Bennell infiltrates and poisons. Gerard Kearns (The Last Kingdom, Shameless) is the older Andy – still a gentle soul but with a closed-off wariness that speaks of still waters running deeper than anyone can fathom. Woodward seems delighted with these on-screen representations. “All the actors are so passionate about this,” he says. “They just wanted to do it justice and get it out there in the world. And it’s unique.”
Floodlights somehow manages to locate a degree of redemption. Against all odds, it feels like a journey from darkness into light. But even if it is eventually hugely emotionally satisfying, that narrative arc is gradual and necessarily painful to navigate. Floodlights handles the abuse with remarkable sensitivity, carefully mapping the gradual escalation of the grooming process. First, Bennell invites the boys back to his house, which – in a way that is retrospectively unspeakably sinister for the exact reasons it must have been wildly exciting at the time – is full of arcade games, jukeboxes and exotic pets (“He had a puma in there!” recalls Woodward). It’s a cave of pre-pubescent boyhood dreams – and now we know why.
Later, Bennell strips naked in the changing room as he talks to the team about their forthcoming fixtures – normalising his nudity in front of them. Eventually, it culminates with him choosing Woodward as his favourite, separating him from his teammates and cajoling him into sharing a bed – there’s nowhere else to sleep, apparently. He is then encouraged to play a skin-crawling “game” called Follow Me. Mercifully, much is left unshown.
Great care has been taken to find a balance; to itemise and communicate what Bennell did without rubbing viewers’ faces in the full horror of it. “We want people to watch this because it really is important,” says Greenhalgh. “So there’s no point in going to extremes or showing the sort of things that, in any case, everyone can imagine happening. It is all about the emotional truths: what was happening in Andy’s brain. I watched Three Girls [the 2017 BBC drama about the child sexual abuse scandal in Rotherham] and there were some graphic scenes in that, and I turned it off. And I shouldn’t; I should be going through it. But it’s very difficult. I’m my own audience but I also think of my mates and where their line would be.”
Instead, the emotional cost and attendant tragedy is laid out in numerical terms. The raw facts about the duration of Woodward’s abuse (years) and its exact nature (horrendous) is overlaid, with text, on the wracked face of Fletcher, who carries an extraordinary weight for one so young. It is the heart of the story. But it isn’t, thankfully, the end.
Woodward still managed a career in football, although it was truncated by panic attacks passed off as injuries. He struggled in retirement, joining the police before being forced to leave following an inappropriate relationship with a family member of a crime victim. He battled depression and was close to suicide on several occasions. Finally, he realised he had to talk. The film ends as Taylor’s recording device is switched on. In many ways, Woodward’s later life is the wider story of a still-evolving version of modern masculinity; of a gradual letting go. Bennell was investigated (and convicted) for other instances of sexual abuse long before Woodward spoke out. When the initial story breaks, his parents tentatively ask him if anything similar happened to him. “Dad, I wouldn’t let something like this happen to me,” says Woodward, heartbreakingly. “I’d have knocked the bastard out.”
At first, Woodward wanted his story to be anonymous. “Real men don’t get raped,” he says to Taylor during their initial meeting. Getting past this self-loathing notion to locate the strength that lies in accepting your true vulnerability is where Woodward’s heroism lies. “He is a hero,” says Greenhalgh. “And this is a hero’s story. We still have the Hollywood ending. Secrets do kill men. It’s as simple as that.” Floodlights ends, movingly, with Woodward watching a youth football match and seeing his teenage self reflected back at him.
“I’m so proud of it,” says Woodward. He’s talking about Floodlights – and then he’s not. “I have no ego, but it takes one whistleblower, and when I broke that story, if you look at the line of events that followed, it gave people a voice and other people started to talk. It will leave some kind of legacy to do with helping others.” It’s a process that has become familiar, playing out everywhere from the #MeToo movement to the allegations surrounding the powerful, predatory likes of Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris.
In helping others, Woodward has helped himself. Floodlights feels like another part of the process by which an agonisingly personal trauma has been, if not overcome, then at least reckoned with. In a 2019 Guardian interview, he described the ongoing aftermath of his abuse as “like being chained to a wolf. Sometimes you might feel like you’ve tamed it and everything’s fine. Then something happens and it’s baring its teeth again.” Now, things seem calmer. “Everyone who has gone through something like this will recognise it,” he says. “It is a life sentence. It’ll never go away, it’s just that I’ve been able to detach some of the emotion that comes with trauma. In terms of the abuse, I’ve done a lot of healing and I can talk about it differently now. I’m not emotionally attached to his abuse any more. It’s like I’ve let the chain go.”
Floodlights is on BBC Two on Tuesday 17 May at 9pm, and on BBC iPlayer
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found atwww.befrienders.org
• You can contact the mental health charity Mind by calling 0300 123 3393 or visiting mind.org.uk. For information on the Depresson app visit depresson.co.uk
