Another television programme about George Best. The heart sank. How could there possibly be anything new to say of a man whose life and career have been scrutinised every day for the past three-and-a -half decades and who has been one of the prime subjects of the relatively recent phenomenon of televised sporting nostalgia?

George Best has been deconstructed and reconstructed to the extent that some of us almost know more about him than we know about ourselves. Enough already.

Faced with this high wall of scepticism, it is therefore the ultimate tribute that the latest of Channel Four's football stories (Monday 9 p.m.), George Best's Body, skips over it like Best riding a tackle from some meat-head full-back.

Originality is the key when journalists are confronted with familiarity and Double-Band Films of Belfast, responsible for this documentary, deserve praise for making an hour-long programme about Best in which only two of the goals we always see are featured.

One is the twisting, labyrinthine effort in America; the other is one of Best's greatest, against Chelsea on a moody night in Manchester when Best rounded the goalkeeper to score having displayed all his formidable willowy athleticism and balance in rebuffing a thuggish lunge from Ron "Chopper" Harris.

That was some goal, steel and skill. That was the Best of strength, but this film focuses mainly on the Best of weakness.

Looking at Best from the perspective of his body, Double-Band started with the 15-year-old, barely seven stone, who left east Belfast for Old Trafford in 1961. With the use of some recognisable faces, like Wilf McGuinness and David Sadler, the sheer frailty of Best is explained in a more rounded way than before.

The Belfast boy was so small he was kept out of the youth team, says

McGuinness, while footage shows the famous car park at Manchester United's training ground, The Cliff, where apprentices and first-teamers indulged in fiercely competitive matches after training.

This clip has never been shown before on national television - it belongs to Sadler, who was a Super 8 fan then - and is a fantastic glimpse into another football age.

Eamon Dunphy, a young United player then, wrote of the car park at The Cliff in his book on Matt Busby, A Strange King of Glory. Speaking of the young Best, Dunphy wrote: "Now he wasn't waltzing past clumsy kids on the street, but international footballers in a crowded car park. The price usually extracted for this kind of thing was short, sharp and painful.

"You might be crushed against the railway fence, propelled into the concrete grandstand wall or simply grounded into the cinder-strewn tarmac.

"Your flesh grazed, the pain as intense as the embarrassment, you soon learned the lesson; don't try it on kid, the dreaming days are over.

"Strangely, George was never caught."

Sadler's short clip gives us a real insight into what Dunphy wrote. Other rare footage from that time, and never broadcast nationally, shows the teenage Best on tour in America, walking in the sunshine in San Francisco - Sadler's again, he being Best's room-mate - and there are also clips from a German-made amateur film, an entire match in which the camera focused solely on Best. It is all very 1960s avant-garde but the Best connoisseur will just be delighted to see some new action.

The producers have gone a long way to uncover this material. "It was one of the tasks we set ourselves," said director Diarmuid Lavery. "In that we succeeded. It became a bit of a detective story."

Charting Best's playing career away from United, there is some atmospheric video of his appearances for Cork Celtic, Stockport County and Dunstable Town, during that brief spell when Best hawked himself around as a pay-as-you-play nomadic superstar. Again, this footage has never been aired nationally before.

That he played for Dunstable was down to Barry Fry. Now manager of Peterborough United, Fry, like Dunphy, was a contemporary of Best's in the early years at Old Trafford. Fry is known now more for his cheekiness than his insight but, when commenting on the condition of Best, mentally and physically, Fry says: "I think George was all or nothing. If you had a drink with him, it never ended. If you had a gamble, it never ended. If he had a woman, it never ended. If he had a football, it never ended."

It feels like a fair summary of an addictive personality. And while the first half of the programme re-establishes who Best was and inevitably covers old ground, the second half consists mainly of new interviews with the man himself, conducted in his new house in County Down.

If the body of the programme is all about Best's body, then these are different, they are all about the mind.

In them it is good to see Best as many have always thought of him, intelligent and sensitive, and they offer a poignant portrait of a 55-year-old contemplating the premature end of his life.

He talks briefly and quickly about the early death of his mother, Ann, who died an alcoholic. He looks gaunt, but, as he would no doubt joke, at least he is alive.

But it is a different character from the one whose autobiography, The Good, the Bad and the Bubbly, begins: "I punched Michael Caine to the floor in Tramps one night."

It is March of this year and Best has, in his words, "had a slight slip as far as the booze was concerned." Knowing that his next drink could be his last, Best has had pellets sewn into the lining of his stomach that make him physically sick should any alcohol enter his system, hopefully before reaching his beleaguered liver.

It is the second time he has had the operation, the first in the 1970s having been botched, and Best is under no illusions about the state of his internal organs.

"It is a big decision because it is an operation they do not like doing," he says. "It was sort of the last resort."

For Best's body, it came literally in the nick of time. "He said you stop or you die and it is as simple as that," Best says of his surgeon.

"He said if you don't stop you won't be around too long. I already knew that and sometimes you think `well, it doesn't matter, it's my decision, but there are too many other people to consider. It's not just me, if it was just me I probably would have said `well, screw it'.

"But it's other people who rely on me, you know, and my son, you know I call him now and I can hear the relief in his voice."

His son, Callum, would probably not be relieved that the garage conversion at Best's house includes a bar. You cannot help but wonder why. Beneath the reflections lies the recklessness of old.

But beneath that lies a core of realism about Best and his body. "You don't actually stop totally until you die," he says, "I mean that's the only time you know you"re not going to have a drink again."

Each added day is thus a small victory. The film concludes with Best stepping over red, white and blue kerbstones to buy some sticks from his local Mace. He seems happy. Just an ordinary legend going about his business. You want to shout: `Keep going George'.

It is footage none of us ever thought we would see. It confirms this is far from just another television programme about George Best.