KEY POINTS:
If there was one thing achieved by Michael Parkinson's interview with Aussie cricket icon Shane Warne, which screened on UKTV on Monday, it was the flashbacks revealing Warney's taste through time for the mullet. Not just a mullet cut, but a dyed mullet - with white and yellow highlights, accessorised with the occasional earring.
The 90-minute interview was a long, slow spin. Parky never pressed Warne on the vanity of his hair crimes; what is it with sports stars and their obsession with mad hair styles? Instead he chose to focus on Warne's outstanding career. Warne started by regurgitating the same line he'd spouted at the press conference to announce his retirement, that the time was right blah blah.
However, Parky cut him off and took Warne way back to the days when he and his brother, (and erstwhile manager), who were fiercely competitive, played in the backyard. His brother shot at him with a speargun. In other incidents, Warne knocked himself out with a boomerang, and broke both legs.
The precedent for a lifetime of injury was set.
Like most teenagers, Warne didn't like being told what to do at school, where he was a regular in the caning queue. And at cricket academy, he couldn't handle the discipline and scarpered.
But as he matured, relatively, he started to listen and focus, and somehow the miraculous synchronicity of mind and wrist began to click.
Like many sporting stars, Warne was able to minutely detail the thinking processes that occur before, during and after a game, with mindblowing recall of names and statistics. It was fascinating trivia.
He also discussed the finer points of sledging - the psychological torture and taunting of one's opponent. You had to pity England player Paul Collingwood, who had confessed in print before a test match with Australia to having to see a shrink.
"What colour was the couch?" Warne hissed at him on the field. "Did you pay for 30 minutes? 90 minutes?"
Parky, looking like a heavy-lidded cane toad, went easy on Warne and held back on asking about the salacious details of the spinner's serial sexual shenanigans. But it was notable when the questions turned more personal, Warne started to sweat.
"Look, I don't have to apologise to anyone except my family," he said. "I done it."
"Is there a compulsion? Why did you keep doing it when you knew there were people out there trying to sting you?" urged Parkinson. "Do you need to see a psychiatrist?"
Geez, mate, he's an Aussie sports star. Get real. No, as Warne told it, when long-suffering wife Simone left him during the 2005 Ashes, he coped as any good bloke would.
He cried ("Oi croyed"), drank the contents of the mini-bar, got it restocked, drank it again, then went out on the field the next day and played a blinder. "I had nowhere to hide," he said. "I could compartmentalise my life."
Maybe that was the problem, and always has been.
Post-divorce, Warne's home life is the same but different. He still lives with Simone and the kids and he reckons, "I'm a very good father."
I wonder if he thought about that when he was cheerfully getting his gear off in a hotel room in front of invariably blonde, big-chested females waving a cameraphone.
For all sorts of reasons, Warne was a legend, and a clown, and the Parky interview only partly showed us why.
