The Real Wagatha Story: Most interesting aspect of new documentary is the woman at the centre of it ] One minute he has curtain-shaped hair, as though his angelic face were a stage, the next he has a mohawk that transforms his head into an exclamation mark There's good stories about how he (awkwardly) began dating Victoria, the sending off in the 1998 World Cup against Argentina, then some death threats and kidnapping plots. Hold on. Fergie? But isn’t the former Manchester United manager an avatar of Succession’s Logan Roy? “You’ve got him all wrong,” says Stevens. “I was really scared to meet him. But I came to love the guy.”

Getting the attention and becoming a celebrity was different to what I wanted," Ferguson said. "Getting David to keep his feet on the ground became more difficult."Stevens learned that Brian Cox, the Scottish actor who played Logan Roy, is friends with Ferguson and used that relationship to get on the good side of the famously irascible football manager. “Brian signed a copy of Fergie’s book which had just come out and I gave it to Sir Alex. That helped get more time with him. And he knew our show. He asked me ‘Why aren’t you going to do a fifth season?’ I told him because it’s over, man.”

Because of the Hollywood writers’ strike, Stevens hasn’t been able to take acting gigs. Not that he hasn’t been busy. He’s beaten Hodgkin’s lymphoma, had two kids with his wife, the film-maker Alexis Bloom whom he married in 2017, and is currently executive producing her upcoming documentary about 60s It Girl Anita Pallenberg. What Stevens didn’t realise when he took the gig was what a diverting cast of characters he had at his disposal. Not just the perma-surly Keane, but French philosopher Eric Cantona and Manc motormouth turned wannabe Labour MP Gary Neville. “I wish I could have made 20 episodes, there’s so much great stuff. I mean, some of those guys. Paul Scholes – what an absolute dude.” That is a sentence I never expected to hear.Other members of the footballer’s family offer anecdotes and titbits, from his strict-sounding father, Ted, to his mother, Sandra, who is great value. She says that when the then-England manager Glenn Hoddle questioned her son’s professionalism and left him on the bench, she “just put him on my hitlist”, and she recalls taking revenge on a journalist staying at the same hotel as she was. Victoria, too, is more frank than you might expect. When recalling a particularly explicit chant about her that came from the stands, she says the woman sitting next to her didn’t know what to do, so just turned to her and said, “Do you want a Polo?” I was aching," he said. "I was hurting. I'd roll out of the bed in the morning because I was in so much pain." Wherever I went, I got abused every day,” he said. “To walk down the street and see people look at you a certain way, spit at you, abuse you, come up to your face and say some of the things that they said, that’s difficult. I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping, I was a mess.” But it was in 1996 when he announced himself to the football world by scoring from the halfway line against Wimbledon.

David's father told him that even though he was in United he'd have to work hard. David practiced with the seniors and realized that he would have to work hard to stay in Machester. Their new coach was Eric, "Even now, a dozen It was the first time that me and Victoria had been put under that kind of pressure in our marriage," he added. He just loved being a footballer

He attributes this to the "family" dynamic at Old Trafford and throughout the documentary calls Ferguson a "father figure". The third reason is most telling. Stevens isn’t just some mug who doesn’t know the beautiful game. Although the Chicago-born Stevens will be a fan of the Cubs (baseball) and Bears (American football) until he dies, he also has something in his wardrobe that marks him out as a soccer stan: a collection of Ivory Coast football shirts. “I went to Stamford Bridge [home of Chelsea FC] and fell in love with Didier Drogba.” What were you doing there? “The first documentary I produced was Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos in 2006. At the time I didn’t know football. Then the producer, John [Battsek], takes me to see Chelsea play and, well, I fell in love. People think he’s this beautiful guy, that everything was handed to him. Not true. He worked his way up and he could have been crushed by what happened to him in 1998 – but he wasn’t. He’s one of the strongest people I know.”