I’ve been looking forward to seeing the film The Damned United - the story of Brian Clough’s 44 day tenure as manager of Leeds United in 1974. The film has received generally positive reviews, helped by Michael Sheen’s uncanny impersonation of "Old Big ‘ead", and the laughs and knowing references to seventies popular culture it contains – it offers a kind of upbeat nostalgia fest for those with misty-eyed memories of a time when men were men, smoking was obligatory and everything else was either brown or orange.

The film contrasts markedly with David Peace’s novel (The Damned Utd), from which the film is adapted. The book doesn’t have many laughs. In fact it is uncompromisingly dark, bleak and dystopic. The book largely takes place inside the mind of Cloughie, who recounts his various fears, hatreds and obsessions; mainly his fear of failure, hatred of Don Revie and Leeds United, and obsessions with money, power and fame, all conducted through an expletive-strewn fog of whisky and cigarettes.

Brian Clough [image © copyright BBC]

But the release of the film has reignited some of the controversy that surrounds the book. The Clough family reacted strongly to Peace’s portrayal, with wife Barbara objecting vehemently to seeing her late husband represented as a "chain-smoking, obscenity-shouting and selfishly driven man". Ex-Leeds player Johnny Giles (who appears in the book as the sullen and duplicitous character "The Irishman") called the book "outrageous and wrong" and won damages against the claim in the book that he had played an instrumental role in Clough’s sacking.

What are we to make of this? On the one hand, the pain and upset caused by the book (published shortly after Clough died, and therefore rendering Peace and his publishers immune to a libel suit from the great man) should not be discounted - think how we might feel if we were represented in this way - but, at the same time, there is the issue of artistic freedom to consider. The Damned Utd is described by Peace as a "Yorkshire Fairy Story" and a "fiction based on a fact" – not a reportage or replay of what actually happened.

Critics have tended to argue that what the book is "really" about is (variably) failure, redemption, vengeance, loneliness and despair; others have read it as a specific evocation of the "problem" of the North at a particular point in time - with the fictional character of "Brian Clough" merely providing the vehicle through which these various issues are explored. I tend to sympathise with this position; however, such aesthetic justifications can appear hard to defend when fact and fantasy are combined and real people get hurt.

The debate raises some important questions for social science. What is the social duty of art and authorship? How far can we hold authors responsible for their texts? Further, for those of us who are students of media studies, it raises issues that routinely crop up as central concerns in the context of our OU course, DA204 Understanding Media; namely, What is the nature of celebrity? To what extent is it possible to define a fixed and "authentic" meaning of a text? What is the relationship between text and audience(s)? How is our reading of a text shaped by our knowledge, values and beliefs?

These are well-established questions which obtaining clear answers to has proved difficult – not that Cloughie would have struggled, he always got things done; as he said: "Rome wasn't built in a day. But I wasn't on that particular job."

About the author

Mark Banks is Reader in Sociology at the Open University. His research interests include the cultural and creative industries, popular culture, cities and urban space.

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