IT WAS failure that made a success of Jackie Stewart. If he had hit one extra target during the trials for the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, he would have been in the Great Britain shooting team, and might subsequently have been lost to the world of mo
torsport.
Shooting, as we learn in the early stages of tonight's documentary, was his initial sporting love. As a dyslexic, Jackie had been written off as stupid at school, and shooting was the first thing for which he had been given any credit.
But his elder brother, Jimmy, was a racing driver, and their father owned a garage in Dunbartonshire, so once he learned he would not be on the Olympic team plane to Rome, Jackie set out on the far longer journey which would take him to the Formula One World Championship.
The story of that ascent, and of his other business activities, is well known, and in that sense Jackie Stewart: The Flying Scot offers nothing novel. Indeed, as it was first produced by Jackie's son Mark, in 2002, it does not bring that story right up to date – there is not a mention, for example, of Stewart's latterday pal Sir Fred Goodwin.
But where this documentary triumphs is in the range of material it has collected. Old episodes of Parkinson, footage from the early Sixties when everything came in softer colours, clips from Stewart's career as a TV presenter in America – it's all here.
Even given the fact that Mark Stewart Productions had pretty good access to their subject, it's an impressive selection from so many different sources.
And, for all that this is a family affair, which includes old family photos as well as interviews with Jackie, his wife Helen, Mark and his brother Paul, it's by no means a whitewash. Stewart's demanding nature, his frequent impatience, his irascibility – they're all in here.
But you don't have to be a particular fan of Stewart, or even of motorsport, to enjoy the story of how, in a few years, this young Scot became the hottest property in Formula 1, and Helen became one of the coolest women on the planet.
As Murray Walker and others recall, Stewart could win a race by a mile or a couple of feet. In 1969 at Monza, for example, he clinched the first of his three world championships by winning a race in which two-tenths of a second covered the first four drivers. On a dreadful rainy day at the Nurburgring, on the other hand, he won by four minutes.
By the time of that Monza race, however, he had already changed his whole attitude to the sport, and to what was then an almost total absence of safety measures. Being in an accident in 1966 – one that saw him trapped in his car and soaked in leaking fuel for a time – convinced him that, while he still loved motorsport, it had to be forced into showing greater humanity towards the drivers.
It took Stewart years to achieve some sort of success in his campaign for better standards, and several of his close friends would die in the interim. Indeed, it was when his team-mate Francois Cevert was killed in practice at Watkins Glen in 1973 that he decided he had had enough. He had planned to compete in the US Grand Prix, which would have been his 100th, but instead he retired immediately.
There is the odd bit of light relief along the way, such as the very Sixties account from Emerson Fittipaldi of his decision to have even longer sideburns than his rival. And there is the occasional Swiss Toni moment too: a racing car, Jackie declares with no sense of irony, "is almost like a woman – it's very sensitive and to get the best out of it you almost have to caress it, coax it".
Above all, though, this is a story of someone who made the most of his natural talent against the odds – not only at first, but throughout his career. Indeed, by the time of his last world championship he was suffering from mononucleosis and a duodenal ulcer.
Graham Hill pops up several times in the documentary – mostly when he is telling Stewart to take it easy and give the other drivers a chance – but there is only a brief mention of Jim Clark. The good news, though, is that on the following two Saturdays BBC 4 will show documentaries devoted to those two. Jim Clark: The Quiet Scot is next week, while Graham Hill: Driven follows on Saturday 26th.
