It was inevitable that Freddie Flintoff would get a documentary of his very own. The only surprise, really, is that it hasn’t come sooner.
The former cricketer is riding high on a wave of good will at the moment. There was his stint on Top Gear; his appearance in the heartwarming BBC show Field of Dreams; his increasing willingness to talk about everything he’s gone through, from bulimia to anxiety.
Let’s be honest, though: what people want from Flintoff is more information on the terrible crash that he sustained in 2022. The one in which his three-wheeled car flipped over and dragged him along the Dunsfold Park Aerodrome racetrack, giving him horrific facial injuries from which he is still recovering today.
The documentary is aware of this. We are told in the opening moments that this Disney+ project was initially pitched to Flintoff as a way of putting all further headlines and stories about this to bed, once and for all.
As a result, the majority of its first half is taken up with exhaustively retelling the story. If you want details, they’re here, in all their gory glory. We hear from Flintoff about the moment the car flipped; how it felt to have his skin, nose and lips shredded (“I thought my face had come off,” he says with grim stoicism).
Hell, we even hear from the specialists at the hospital he was airlifted to. One of them duly tells the camera that Flintoff’s injuries were “in the top five” of injuries of its type that he’d ever seen. We get images – a lot of them, stomach-churning ones. It’s almost as if the documentary is willing us to look away: you wanted the gory details. Here’s all of them.
After a while it all gets a bit queasy, so fortunately – its job done – the documentary veers off from there into more compelling territory: Flintoff’s actual life. We hear about the young cricketer’s promise, his rise through the ranks and early years playing for England.
A procession of people that Flintoff is close to – his old coach, his teammates – are all wheeled on to chat about how excellent he was (though the film could have done without the cringeworthy appearances from celeb pals James Corden and Jack Whitehall). This culminates in a blow-by-blow retelling of the 2005 Ashes triumph that makes you want to punch the air.
Throughout it all, Flintoff comes across as thoroughly likeable: a Lancaster lad done good, as Northern “as gravy” (as Whitehall puts it), somebody who has remained pretty humble even as the press tore him apart on his rise to fame.
The documentary also spares nothing when it comes to Flintoff’s well-documented struggles with bulimia, anxiety and alcoholism. We hear about the infamous pedalo incident from Flintoff’s own mouth, conducted during a drunken binge during his lowest ebb, and for which he spent the rest of his sporting career apologising.
We also hear how his desire to chase that cricketing ‘high’ post-retirement led to him taking greater and greater risks, culminating in that crash. Throughout it all, we dip back in and out of the story of said crash, accompanying Flintoff for some his endless reconstruction surgeries, and as he takes his steps back into public life for the first time. Quite a few people tell us that cricket “saved” Flintoff as he struggled with PTSD post-accident; watching him on the pitch, laughing around with his young trainees, you can believe.
The structure of the whole thing is slightly odd: taking the crash as its focal point, before switching to the giddying highs of Flintoff’s Ashes triumphs, strikes a tonally jarring note. But still, there’s more than enough to enjoy here, and as time passes, it’s impossible not to be sucked in. This is warts and all storytelling, and Freddie Flintoff is an engaging storyteller.
Flintoff is streaming on Disney+ from April 25
