Marvellous reviews itself in its title. The story of Neil Baldwin starring Toby Jones was – and is, because you should catch it while you can on iPlayer – simply marvellous. As a dramatic character Neil Baldwin could be mistaken for unremarkable. He has no hidden depths. Positioned somewhere along the autistic spectrum, he is apparently away with the fairytales, but his grandiose fantasies mostly happened to be true. Though droll without always intending to be, he has an enviable gift for friendship. And his story has something to teach us about civility and good cheer and holding on to your dreams.
The story as told by Peter Bowker was fairly simple and, at the same time, deeply unusual. When we first met him Neil was working as a clown on tour in Scotland. "I'm not a mong," he would later claim, "I'm a registered clown." But he soon got fired and had to hitchhike back home to Stoke where his devout mother (Gemma Jones) worried about how he would keep himself busy. He’s always busy, he explained. “I’m behind on my birdwatching, Gerry Cottle’s in town and I’m writing an extra verse for the Lord’s Prayer.”
And he was always busy. He sauntered over to Keele University, put on a dog collar – because Neil has a gift for fancy dress – and started greeting freshers on campus. Soon he became a regular feature, attending lectures, making friends, starting his own football team in which he barely got a kick. He was also a devotee of Stoke City. Hanging around the stadium a lot he got chatting to the new manager Lou Macari (Tony Curran), who liked the cut of his jib and invite him inside to become the kit man. He became so beloved at the club – by players and fans – that the crowd took to chanting “There’s only one Neil Baldwin!”
In Peter Bowker’s playful script there were in fact two Neil Baldwins. Toby Jones – who brilliantly captured the poker face of an unknowing clown - now and then asked the real Neil about the facts of his life. “Did you feel he was picking on you because your difficulties?” “What difficulties?” The idea was to interrogate the sheer unbelievability of a life in which Baldwin got himself invited to lunch with Tony Benn in the House of Commons, onto the Boat Race launch boat and selected to play for Stoke in a testimonial game. Lou Macari also turned up as himself in the dugout. “This really happened by the way,” he told himself. And there were a couple of other pleasing football cameos.
A drama without any difficulties at all would struggle to keep going for 90 minutes, and part of the tension of Marvellous lay in the possibility of something awful intruding on this charmed life. When Baldwin’s mother finally died, having fretted about how he’d cope without her, Jones’s sudden grief was heartbreaking. But for the most part Marvellous was a delightful and moving paean to Micawberesque good cheer. And like its subject, a genuine one-off.