Marked for life

The story could have been a work of fiction from the hand of a master craftsman. Gerry McGowan was just 17 years old and had signed professional terms with Leicester City football club in 1979. An exact contemporary, who had also just signed terms, was Gary Lineker.

Gerry got himself a perm as impressionable footballers tended to do in the 1970s. Gary gave him stick about the hairdo. Gerry didn't mind about that, though. As an attacking midfielder, he thought he had the edge over the future golden boy of English football.

Then Gerry, suffering from homesickness, decided to take a short break and return to his home in Derry. It was done with the full permission of the club. The next significant piece of paper that Gerry signed was a false confession implicating him in the murder of a British soldier. This, rather than his professional contract, was to have the greatest impact on his life. For the next 20 years, he spent his life on the run, a fugitive from injustice. The extraordinary fact about Gerry McGowan's story is the truth of it, which was faithfully described in Running Scared (BBC2).

The opening scenes in this documentary were a moving testament to a life which had gone missing. There were the old football snaps, invariably featuring Gerry and Gary in the same team in the days of their teenage pomp. These photographs purely encapsulated the optimism of youth. For anyone to hide away for 20 years would be an enormous privation, but McGowan's predicament was given extra piquancy because he was always following the career of his former team mate Lineker and thinking, "It could have been me."

McGowan paid a visit to Filbert Street, the now derelict ground which Leicester City once called home. The programme makers resisted the temptation to ram home the analogy, but the decaying stands were an accurate reflection of the ambition once harboured by a young man.

There was another visit, this time to his late parents' home in Derry, from which the Army and RUC had taken him, back in 1979. There was a strong sense that Gerry McGowan was now reduced to the incorporeal status of a ghost in those places where he should have been a real person, alive and kicking. Because his past had been taken away, the present could have no substance.

Running Scared packed such an emotional punch because of its restraint. The details of the morning of Gerry's arrest had a dream-like quality, which only later darkened into nightmare. He recalled feeling that his arrest was some rite of passage, just another example of a common occurrence in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, just another story to tell the boys on the street when he was released. Except that he was bullied into signing an admission of murder and was not released.

Standing outside the police station where it happened, Gerry finally broke down in tears. He envisaged those responsible for his wrongful arrest were still inside, laughing at the sight of his tears. "Those bastards ruined my life," was the worst vitriol he could muster.

Fortunately, as far as the viewers' tear ducts were concerned, Gerry found some sort of life on the run. He fled to southern Ireland and held down a job in a hotel. He met and married Julie and had two children, although her parents were never told that he was a fugitive because they would surely have prevented the union. By dint of a secretive rerouting of the funeral cortege, he even managed to pay his last respects to his mother. Finally, in 1998, Gerry received a telephone call from his father to tell him that all the charges had been dropped. He could go home again.

As Gerry and Julie faced the cameras, however, it was clear that neither had come to terms with the theft of 20 years of his life. With her husband unable to articulate, Julie haltingly explained that it was not a question of compensation, simply the desire for an apology from someone which they both sensed would never arrive. But when it seemed that these wounds would never heal, Gerry returned once more to those old football photographs.