New documentary captures George Best at his worst

In 2014 Dan Gordon was approached by a production company to direct a film-length documentary about George Best but the English director’s research had already begun inadvertently two years earlier.

Gordon’s acclaimed work on the Emmy-nominated ESPN Films production Hillsborough, the story of the disaster that claimed 96 lives at the home of his own beloved Sheffield Wednesday in 1989, had taken him to Belfast for the first time in 2012 when all preconceptions about Best’s home place were thrown upside down.

Gordon was gobsmacked by the modernity of a city that stood at odds with his childhood following the Troubles on TV and the compact, provincial feel to the place would inform his understanding of what landing in cosmopolitan Manchester in the early 1960s must have felt like for a shy and retiring Irish teenager.