Tyson Fury: The Gypsy King: Close-up bout with Tyson Fury and his family packs an emotional punch

Never having been especially keen on biffing — it’s probably too late to take it up now myself — I had not much attended to Tyson Fury before.

But Tyson Fury — The Gypsy King, a three-part fly-on-the-wall documentary that began last week and continues tonight, has changed all that.

This is a really fascinating, close-up glimpse into the life of an extraordinary man, a fearsome fighter but also touchingly vulnerable, not so much to his rivals as to his own troubles. Both he and his wife Paris talk about themselves and their life together with radical frankness.

Fury, from an Irish traveller family famous for fighters, was born in 1988, three months premature, weighing just a pound and not expected to survive.

His dad John, an intimidating figure in his own right, named him after Mike Tyson in the hope he’d battle his way through.

Tyson Fury now stands 6ft 9in and fights at 18-stone-something. He’s a giant but such an odd-looking figure too, bald and ungainly, almost humdrum, seeming much less muscular than must obviously be the case, since in action he is fast and lithe as well as strong.

He became British heavyweight champion in 2014, and in 2015 heavyweight champion of the world after defeating Wladimir Klitschko. He had fulfilled the ambition of his life — and his life promptly fell apart. He became suicidally depressed, he failed drugs tests, drank heavily, became monstrously fat, was deemed unfit to fight, and in 2016 surrendered his titles.

However, after two years out, Fury made an extraordinarily courageous comeback. In December 2018 he fought WBC champion Deontay Wilder, reputedly the hardest hitter ever. Wilder floored Fury twice, in the last round with a punch it seemed impossible anyone could come back from. But he got up and beat the count. The bout was judged a draw, although Fury felt he had won.

And that’s where this documentary starts. We see him at home in grey Morecambe, with Paris, punchy and articulate in her own right, and their five children, the boys all named Prince — “I’m a king, they’re princes”, Fury explains. His happiness is very dependent on his wife, he admits.

She’s pretty tough too, it’s soon clear. In tonight’s programme, when he slips off to the pub she rings him there to say: “I’m not talking to you, f*** off, don’t bother coming home.”

When she visits him at a training camp in Marbella, his excitement is really touching. But they have an argument at the airport. “Tyson’s always been difficult, Tyson’s always had this like split personality, where one minute he’s high, one minute he’s low. He got diagnosed — bipolar got mentioned, schizophrenia got mentioned. It’s like living with Droopy and a Smurf, you don’t know which one you’re going to get,” she says. But she also says: “From 16 years old, I’ve loved this man.”

The first part of this documentary built up to Fury’s first fight after Wilder, with German boxer Tom Schwarz in Vegas, a quick victory with a technical KO. Tonight the climax is his much more difficult bout last September with Swedish southpaw Otto Wallin, in which Fury got badly cut.

Watching back at home at four in the morning, his sparky nine-year-old daughter Venezuela’s eyes well with tears. This Saturday, Fury faces Wilder again... and after watching this I’m hoping he biffs him good.

Tyson Fury — The Gypsy King is on ITV, 9pm tonight

Read more

This Country pays tribute to late star Michael Sleggs in new series

John Cooper Clarke is the star poser in Portrait Artist Of The Year

Harry Redknapp funnels his reality show capital into Sandbanks Summer