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selected from shoot diaries spanning three decades

Another At Home with David and Victoria

19th April 2000

Producer Serena and I are at fever pitch, as is the entire nation, because David, helped by ten other Manchester United worthies, is to meet and destroy Real Madrid in a tussle that might be as fascinating and history-diverting as the trouncing of the Armada. Unbeaten at home in almost a year, Manchester are confident, and in a call suggesting we might get some good stuff if we meet him at the flat and then travel with the family to the stadium, David is clearly keen as mustard.

 

However we are in a jam on the M6 when David leaves The Edge for the ground. Instead of lolling about as usual in the players’ lounge we experience a quick Biriani at Khan’s Curry Centre in Fallowfield. Buy A-Z to work out the quickest route to Old Trafford, and are saved from disgrace by a phone call to friends who know about football, who confirm that yes, incredibly, there are indeed two Old Traffords, one of them a cricket ground. Luckily only one of them has 61,000 people wearing red outfits outside it, and I settle down in the rain to shoot their progress and endure a variety of suggestions about a possible relationship between the camera and my rectal passage.

 

More suggestions but also jolliness in the bar of the Lass o’Gowrie, where we shoot punters drinking and horrified by a Roy Keane own goal. The trick now is to get back to Beckham Towers and lie in wait in the car park, coiled like springs when the conquering hero returns, or limps in wanting to talk about the beautiful game gone ugly.

 

The Reds are two down by the time we hit the road. By Didsbury there’s another. By  Altrincham David has put away a sizzler, one of his best, we understand, from the car radio. Paul Scholes manages another but it’s not looking good.

 

The big question is whether Victoria will let us upstairs if David is too tired for intimate filming. In the event, she’s all smiles and we’re in. David is expansive, his parents bored and sister possibly brooding about something. It’s always about reading the mood in Camelot and assessing the risks in getting the camera out. The highlight of the evening is watching David, still suited and booted, watching his own performance and praising the Spanish like any other fan.

 

Victoria is also on good form. She and baby Brooklyn have been roosting in the Los Angeles Four Seasons while recording for her solo album. Coming home, BA have managed to lose four matching Louis Vuitton bags. She dances about the location and cooks a pizza for Serena and I, and then slips into lime green velour pyjamas and matching frog slippers, contents of another bag strangely ignored by the bag thieves. They came from Tesco she says and is happy for them filmed in close-up.

 

Not really knowing anything about football may cause problems eventually, but now this sort of Alderley night, footie, pizza, great sync is great stuff. David I think is beginning to enjoy the idea of a film about babies and haircuts.

 

they missed them when they were gone