Tall tales: how my local and I became part of That Peter Crouch Film | Barry Glendenning

What I expected to be a breezy 20 minutes’ chat turned into a three-hour interrogation. Some of it even made the cut From time to time in this job, an offer of extracurricular work in the role of a talking head on a TV show or documentary presents itself. It is a measure of the extremely high regard in which I am held in the sportswriting and broadcasting business that the handful to have found their way into my inbox tend to be at the snake-belly lowbrow end of the spectrum. While more exalted and successful colleagues in possession of far more intellectual heft tend to turn up on heavyweight productions about Ayrton Senna, Lionel Messi or Paul Gascoigne, my invitations tend to be restricted to shows destined to be forever repeated on a late-night Dave loop. All filler and very little killer, they tend to involve the discussion of blunders and bloopers, or simply remembering things. Due in no small part to my inherent laziness coupled with a dread of appearing on television born of extreme self-consciousness, they are invariably rejected out of hand. Earlier this year, however, I was made an offer I found difficult to refuse. Out of the blue in January, a man named Ben Hirsch made contact to enquire about the possibility of interviewing me for a documentary he was making about the famously reclusive and publicity-shy former England football international Peter Crouch. A director with Workerbee, a northern-based production company that, by its own account, specialises in “gripping and globally reaching stories that fascinate and entertain”, Ben quickly sold me on the idea of participating in a film documenting the process in which a conspicuously lanky and gawky child apparently blessed with all the physical coordination of a tangled Slinky stuck halfway down the stairs had triumphed over apparently insurmountable God-given adversity to reach the higher echelons of his profession as an elite footballer, becoming a much-loved household name and media personality in the process. Continue reading...