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 film sets his version beside a very different one, told years later by Michael Kelly, a doorman who says he was there.
Shaw, the presenter points out, would have been in his late fifties or early sixties at the time. That matters by the end.
Shaw's version
In his book, and in conversation with Kate Kray, Shaw tells it like this. He went to the club on its opening night with a woman. The doormen did not know who he was, but the owners did, and they let him into the VIP area. He was treated well and that was all.
When he came back, the door would not let him in. There was an argument, and by Shaw's account ten or fifteen doormen steamed into him, and the two sides went at each other back and forth. The book closes with Shaw returning later that night and waiting in a dark alley with a hammer, reflecting on how his life always seemed to end in violence, ready for the doormen to come out. In later interviews on YouTube channels, the presenter says, Shaw claimed he did eventually track down a couple of the doormen and deal with them.
Kelly's version
Michael Kelly came over from Ireland, where by the presenter's account he had an unbeaten run of bare-knuckle fights. He worked the doors in London in the 1980s and 90s, when, as he puts it, it was hit first and discuss later. He says Lenny McLean worked the same stretch of London and looked out for the doormen. He was friends with Tony Tucker, and has photographs of himself with Tucker and the rest of the door to show it.
Kelly agrees with Shaw on one point: police had been round to warn the door staff not to let Shaw in because he was trouble. But he says there was an incident on that first night. By his account Shaw smashed a glass and threatened someone, and the frightened owners told the doormen to let him leave quietly and then bar him.
On the second night, Kelly says, Shaw came back with the same crowd as before. He describes them not as criminals but as flash hangers-on, car dealers and a few wealthy Greek Cypriots with bundles of cash, cheeky to the door and boasting that their watches could buy the doormen for a year.
Behind the glass doors
The club had big glass doors at the front. Kelly says the door team refused Shaw's party, locked the doors and stayed inside, which the presenter, himself a former doorman, says was normal practice with a large group. According to Kelly, Shaw's party then started pushing and hitting the glass, making gun signs and throat-cutting signs at the doormen. The management told them not to go out.
Then, in Kelly's telling, a doorman called Lee Chapman, whom he describes as a very serious man of around six foot six, slid back the bolts, looked at the others and opened the doors. Kelly says Chapman ran straight at Shaw and knocked him off his feet, that Shaw went down and was stamped on, and that the rest of the door went into everyone else. Kelly says three police vans across the road drove off, and that three or four ambulances came.
As for the man with the hammer in the alley, Kelly says the doormen had gone home an hour and a half or two hours later. He believes someone at the all-night bus stop across the road saw Shaw, heavily bandaged after discharging himself from hospital, and called the police, who arrested him.
The pub in the East End
It did not end there, Kelly says. Once the doormen learned who Shaw was, they were warned that his side would not let it lie, and that a hundred men might come for them. They worked several doors and could raise numbers of their own, so they decided not to wait. By Kelly's account, twenty-five or so of them turned up at a rough East End pub at six in the evening, locked the doors behind them and went through the place shouting for Shaw. Afterwards, he says, they heard nothing.
Getting old
Kelly, the presenter notes, is disparaging about Shaw in the interview, calling him a bully who was always looking for trouble. He says he preferred McLean. The presenter did not know either man, and says friends of his who spent time with Shaw speak highly of him. Everyone sees people differently.
But on the fight itself, he finds Kelly believable, and he says why. However hard these men were, a lot of them lost fights they never put in their books. A man in his late fifties or early sixties, and never a big one, was not going to be a match for a six-foot-six doorman in his thirties. It is a nice thought that the old hard men stayed unbeatable right to the end. It is not reality.