A Friday night at the end of the summer of 1993, in Salford. The Inn of Good Hope on Eccles Old Road is busy: pints going over the bar, the jukebox on, a few lads still arguing about the United game. The two men who run its door run doors right across Greater Manchester.
One of them, Paul Doyle, a five foot eight Salford brawler they call One Punch, is sitting on the little flight of stairs up to the toilets with the Football Pink. At the top of the stairs is his partner: a sixteen-stone doorman in a smart jacket who talks like a newsreader and looks like Roger Moore. His name is Graeme Boardman.
The shield
A little before eleven, a car pulls up. A window comes down, and close to eleven shots come through the glass front doors in a matter of seconds. Two doormen go down. At that moment a woman steps out of the ladies right beside Graeme, straight into the line of fire.
He does not throw her clear. He lifts her off her feet and holds her in front of his own body as he runs for cover. It is all caught on a camera the police had fitted to the pub a few weeks before. When Doyle tells him he could have got her killed, Graeme looks at him, perfectly calm, and says: "Would you have preferred that I was shot, Paul?"
The man who never came home
That was Graeme Boardman. A man who left eight men unconscious outside a Manchester club after telling them they had had too much to drink. A man who told three of the most feared gangsters in Manchester to get out of their car if they wanted to threaten him. A man who ran the door of the biggest club in the north, went into the drugs trade with a British crime lord his best friend will only call William, and in the summer of 1997 fled to Spain.
He never came home. No body. No funeral. Nobody ever charged.
This free first episode is the opening of the film. The full documentary, Episode 2, follows his whole life, from the football pitches of Irlam to the Costa del Crime, and ends with the three stories of what happened to him.