Our Picks

The films our viewers watched most.

  1. The King of the Bouncers v a Feared Gypsy Gang · A thick-set man walks into a pub, orders a beer and puts a pound down on the pool table among the wads of notes being staked on the game. The men playing do not know him and do not like it. One asks who he is. Another, b
  2. Lenny McLean v Two Big Gangsters · In the 1980s Lenny McLean was the main man in London for enforcer work, usually minding deals between heavy firms while he made his name in bare-knuckle and unlicensed fights. This film reads a passage from his autobiogr
  3. The Night the ICF Met an Essex Door Team · Some time in the second half of the 1980s, a group of around thirty young West Ham lads went out in Romford and ended up at Hollywood's, a new and impressive nightclub that had been open only a few years. By the end of t
  4. Cliff Fields: Britain's Hardest Doorman · Cliff Field was a man mountain: six foot seven, more than 20 stone, with a right hand that could knock out a bull. In the early 1980s he fought Lenny McLean twice in unlicensed fights, and both times McLean was carried o
  5. Brian Cockerill v Dave Garside · In the North East of the 1980s and early 1990s the names that get remembered are Brian Cockerill, Lee Duffy, Viv Graham and Paddy Conroy. Dave Garside is less well known. He ran security, and he was a serious heavyweight
  6. Paul Sykes v Gary Spiers: The Blackpool Battle · Paul Sykes, from Wakefield, stood six foot three, weighed sixteen stone and had, in the film's words, a hair-trigger temper. Gary Spiers, a New Zealander of Maori heritage, was a karate man and doorman who had built a se
  7. The Night a Champion Boxer Was Attacked in Gateshead · John L. Gardner had been heavyweight champion of Britain and Europe. He had beaten Paul Sykes, and gone toe to toe with Ali in an exhibition. In November 1992, two months into a new life as a pub landlord in Gateshead, h
  8. Roy Shaw v the Hollywood Bouncers · Roy "Pretty Boy" Shaw wrote about a great many fights, and he ends his book with one of them: a night at a new club in Romford, called Hollywood, in the late 1980s or early 1990s, when the door staff turned on him. This
  9. How Lenny McLean Was Hunted by Gangsters · Lenny McLean was the king of the bouncers, a fearsome street fighter and a force in unlicensed boxing, though not unbeatable: he lost to good boxing men like Johnny Waldron, Cliff Fields and Kevin Paddock. But being a le
  10. John Anderson: Coventry's Hardest Doorman v a Giant Rugby Player · In the Coventry of the 1980s, the film says, one doorman stood above the rest. John "Awesome" Anderson kept the city's clubs and bars as safe as they could be by taking on some of its toughest men, and he was the mentor