John DeLorean: man of mystery – and full-blown psychopath

DeLorean: Back from the Future was one of those documentaries — for me at least — that takes a story you thought you sort of knew and makes you realise a) that you didn’t really, and b) what a great story it is.

The programme began, as it was pretty much duty-bound to, with a clip of Michael J. Fox and the time-travelling DeLorean car from the movie that inspired Wednesday’s means-less-the-more-you-think-about-it subtitle. A series of captions then introduced us to John DeLorean himself: a man who ‘had everything’ (cue shots of a much younger ex-model wife and some Rolexes) until he ‘risked it all’ in the mid-1970s, when he left a high-ranking post at General Motors to found his own sports-car company. Now all he needed was the money.

Luckily, the British government was happy to help. Having failed to secure a deal in the Republic of Ireland, whose party-pooping ministers actually checked up on his claim to have 30,000 advance orders, DeLorean was given around £54 million to set up in Belfast — almost every mention of which the programme illustrated with a handy montage of explosions.