If Andrew Flintoff knocked on our front door, I’d pass out with excitement; it was in this house, after all, that my beloved domestic colleague and I watched Flintoff and England win the Ashes in 2005, a victory that seemed to bless its every brick (we’d just moved in). But in Preston, where he grew up, his celebrity is not, it seems, a given. On the city’s Broadfield Estate, no one is interested in cricket, a sport that’s “boring” and only for posh people. “Fair play to the lad,” says one boy, having discovered, via Google, that Flintoff’s wife is “well fit”. About his prowess on the pitch, on the other hand, this teenager is rather less excited. “What’s an MBE?” he asks, frowning at his mobile.
Ordinarily, series in which famous people co-star with mere civilians are not for me. But Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams (Flintoff’s nickname is Freddie) is the most stirring thing I’ve seen on television in years: a show I can’t watch without crying. It says so much that’s painfully true about Britain in 2022, doing the work of any number of earnest documentaries about neglect and poverty – and yet, its focus is really the ineffable greatness of sport: the way it can bring people together when all else is lost; its particular qualities of transfiguration. Doubtless, it has a good director, and efficient producers. In the end, though, the reason it is both so successful and so inspiriting is Flintoff, who has known good times as well as bad, and who speaks to everyone he meets in the same straightforward, kind, rather wry manner. In another life, he would have been the best sort of teacher: a man who can control the zoo that is a certain kind of classroom without ever needing to raise his voice.
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