THE item which pushed Hello! magazine to its record British circulation of more than 650,000 copies featured a character of an altogether higher celebrity: Paul Gascoigne, snapped on his wedding day.
There was Gazza with a bleached crop wearing a brocade frock coat; there was his mum, looking just like a female version of her boy; there was his new wife Sheryl, showing off the £4,500 boob job he gave her for her birthday, her freshly sculpted assets poking their way into every other frame.
We all have our opinions of who Gazza is. He's the prat with the gob who represents the triumph of the yob; or he's a genius capable of doing things with his feet which lift the spirits of his followers out of their dreary norm. When he humiliates a fancy foreign full-back he becomes, for the English, a living example to the rest of the world. And when a polite Scandinavian film crew asks if he has a message for the people of Norway and he replies "yes, fuck off" they blush, for much the same reason.
That is the measure of Paul Gascoigne's celebrity: in the six years since he spilt public tears at the 1990 World Cup, he has metamorphosed from being merely a gifted footballer into a convenient metaphor for the state the English are in.
In Gazza's Coming Home, a film to be screened on Channel 4 on Monday, Ken McGill has persuaded his subject to give him unprecedented access to his life: he was there when Gazza, got spliced ("Ah'm not going through that again, he said afterwards), he was there when Gazza changed his son's nappy ("I feel like Vinny Jones," he said when wiping the boy's testicles), he was there when Gazza met Sean Connery ("I just shook hands with him", was the lad's awed reaction afterwards. "Imagine how many boobs that hand's touched.") The director has faded so cunningly into the background that his subject has forgotten he was ever there; Gazza drops his guard with such regularity 1p this film he displays all the prerequisites of a British heavyweight contender. So open, so frank is the book about referees about his colleagues attitudes, about his own foibles that in the paranoid world of football, where bland is best and voicing opinion is construed as dangerous deviancy, it is guaranteed that Gascoigne will get into hot water for this.
But to expose its subject to yet more moral indignation isn't his purpose, McGill says.
"I wanted to get across who he is. My opinion is no more valid than anyone else's but, as it happens, I think he's that cheeky lad at the back of class you admired but didn't dare emulate, the one who always went too far and used to infuriate the hell out of you. But you couldn't stay mad with him for long because he always made amends by doing something that made you laugh.
This may be true, but how does McGill explain way Gazza has become such a defining figure of English popular culture.
"I think we see in him what we are, or rather what we used to be before we grew up. Did you see that Angus Deayton programme about trepanning, those people who drill holes in their head? I thought of Paul when I saw that. Apparently the skull doesn't fully come together until you're about 17. And you're, not adult until it does. Well, the people Deayton interviewed say trepanning makes them feel young, like kids, no pressure - full of spontaneity. no longer enclosed. After spending a year with him, I'm convinced Paul's got a hole in the head."
McGill's film follows the perpetual juvenile through the most critical 12 months of his career. After Italia 90, the player stood on the brink of greatness. Subsequently, though, he got himself injured time and again - generally, as in the 1991 Cup Final, through his own adrenalin-fuelled recklessness. His time in Italy, with the Roman club Lazio, was an injury-peppered nightmare. Precedent suggested that his injuries - particularly the damage to the cruciate ligament - were so severe he would never play again, let alone play internationally.
His recovery was mainly down to his will to get back, a determination driven by fear of what his life would be like without football, something he had glimpsed during his long lay-off. "Where would you be now if you weren't a footballer?" McGill asks him at one point. "Phew," says Gazza. "I honestly daren't think."
Football has always been the only point of self-expression Gascoigne has. He was hopeless at school, virtually unteachable - not malicious, but, like a big labrador puppy bouncing around a bedsit, seriously disruptive. And there were hints, too, of more significant problems. The poet Ian Hamilton in his epic Gazza Agonistes suggested that Gascoigne is afflicted by a mild form of Tourette's Syndrome, the nervous disorder which compels its sufferers to compound their embarrassment in public places by yelling obscenities. A sort of social vertigo, comic to the outside world, the condition is terrifying for the sufferer driven as they are by the urge to call attention to their public discomfort. Whenever there is a pair of trousers available to be pulled down, you can rest assured he will be the one to do it.
FOOTBALL wasn't just a place to find self expression, though. Through it he found what he craved most, companionship. It is the most telling character trait to emerge from McGill's year in Gascoigne's company, this almost pathological fear he has of being alone.
Gascoigne needs to have people around him. More than that, he needs to be entertained by them. Warm, giving, in company he is forever howling with laughter at bad gags, falling about at juvenile pranks. The friends role is to help him forget the pressure. McGill's camera catches one of them telling an anecdote in a north-of-England accent so broad a dozen rewinds wouldn't help you understand what he is on about. But Gazza knows, and is speechless with laughter, his eyes dam ping, big mouth open and square, howling. He looks happy.
He's blessed and he's cursed," says McGill. "He's blessed because he's found something at which he is brilliant to help him escape from what he might otherwise have become. And he's cursed because that skill has meant he is surrounded by the ludicrous circus of his celebrity. think if he had understood the insanity around him he would have been finished by it. Luckily for him his brain operates on a nice innocent level."