Ian Wright: Home Truths review – a childhood blighted by fear

Back in the early 1970s, four people shared a single room in a house on Merritt Road, south-east London. They were a family of sorts, made up of two scared brothers, one beaten mother and a terrifying stepdad. “I remember hating him so much,” says Ian Wright of his stepfather. “And being so scared of him. He was so big and his voice was so growly.”

In Ian Wright: Home Truths (BBC One), the 57-year-old former Arsenal striker turned football pundit revisits that room for the first time in 50 years. He remembers things long gone – the orange flowery wallpaper, where the TV stood, the Z-bed he shared with his brother Maurice.

Most of all, he remembers the day his stepdad tried to strangle his mum. “She was trying to say ‘sorry’ when he had his hands around her throat,” he recalls. “You think to yourself is she going to be OK because she’s so small. It made me feel so helpless.” Mum was often stepdad’s punchbag, one time sporting a cut below one eye. .

His mother was not just a victim, but became an abuser. “Ian,” she would say to him, “I wish I’d terminated you.” It was the first time the eight-year-old had heard that word, but he quickly knew what it meant.

And then there were the Saturday nights when Ian would get excited to hear the Match of the Day theme tune. “My stepdad would make me turn away to face the wall when it was on. Just because he could.” If Ian tried to peek, his stepdad would scream at him.

Not many years later, Match of the Day viewers would bear witness to the consequences of that abuse. The scared, anxious boy became, in part, an angry if successful footballer. In a montage, we see Wright squaring up to Chelsea’s Dennis Wise, scything down defenders and – oh dearie me – getting restrained by a teammate to stop him thumping the ref.

For all the therapists, sociologists, teachers, survivors and perpetrators of abuse Wright talks to, this otherwise beautiful and important documentary doesn’t account for why Wright is no longer anger’s plaything.

After all, until he made this programme, Wright had never sought therapy or talked about his childhood abuse with those who were in that room half a century ago. Nonetheless, he has become a loving and beloved husband and dad, so far as I can tell. On Match of the Day now, he cuts a mellow figure. How come he, rather than perpetuating the cycle of abuse, broke it?

Instead of answering that question, he interviews former abusers struggling to do just that. There’s Wes, who’s working with therapists to see that being physically intimidating to his partner was abusive. There’s Naomi, abused by her ex, who in turn became abusive to her daughter, before realising that her boozing and bawling served no one, least of all herself.

It is a shame Wright’s mum was too frail to take part in this programme. I wonder if she will watch it, and how she will feel about her son saying how much he adores her and yet how much he hated her. I wonder, too, what his estranged stepdad will make of this. Most of all, I wonder if Wright, who tells us he forgave his mum, could ever forgive his stepdad. That would be the hardest work of all.

The point for Wright in dragging up this past is to highlight how damaging it is for children to witness domestic abuse. In the 70s, one former social worker tells Wright, children who witnessed their mothers being beaten by their fathers were not thought to be traumatised as a result. Only earlier this year, thanks to the Domestic Abuse Act, was the law changed so children can be regarded as victims of domestic abuse. That reform is necessary, not sufficient. “One million kids are living with domestic abuse,” the social worker says. “That has to change.”

As Wright closes the door to the house in Merritt Road for the last time, he says: “There’s no love here, that’s for sure.” Oh, but there was once. Little Maurice would place his hands over Ian’s ears to stop him hearing his stepdad punch and strangle his mother.

For 50 years, the brothers scarcely talked about those times. For this show, though, they sit on a park bench and time travel. “What you done through that time,” Ian told Mo sweetly, “I can’t thank you enough.” And what did Mo, not yet 10, do? What parents should do for their children – love them no matter what.