Boris Becker: the rise and fall
Relatives
Saver, spender or spender… at the weekend, Mail On Sunday financial wizard Rachel Rickard Straus detailed a clever guide to the psychology of cash.
Other personality types on their list included the money maker, the gambler, and those who claim to be simply indifferent to money (although, in my experience, they care the most about the contents of their wallets).
The seventh category is the one that worries the most. That’s me… I’m worried I don’t have any.
But there is an eighth type, very rare: the Becker. He wastes untold fortunes, but apparently would rather go to prison than pay off his debts. The Beckers could face court for non-payment of taxes, then borrow more than a million pounds from a friend at 25 per cent interest and be unable to pay it back.
In the photo: Boris Becker, who won Wimbledon three times.
The second episode of Boris Becker: The Rise and Fall presented the tennis player’s financial disasters in a direct and clinical way.
Despite a confusing and fragmented opening episode last week, the second part of Boris Becker: The Rise And Fall (ITV1) was much better, tackling the three-time Wimbledon champion’s financial disasters in a direct and clinical way.
His plans to evade bankruptcy were complex, but this narrative was not: it began with his divorce from Barbara Becker in 2001 and ended two decades later when Boris pocketed half a million euros for his first interview after being released from prison.
It’s amazing to imagine how one man can get into so much trouble. After a woman he barely knew became pregnant after having sex in a broom closet at London’s chi-chi restaurant Nobu, he had to pay her £2 million in compensation plus £5,000 a month in child maintenance. . That could be the most expensive quickie ever.
He spent £15m building a hideout in Mallorca and allegedly failed to pay half a million in debts to contractors. Most incredible of all, he was the victim of a scam in which he claimed diplomatic immunity from bankruptcy proceedings, believing he had been appointed “attaché for sporting, cultural and humanitarian affairs” to the Central African Republic, a country he had never visited. It turned out that the documents he hoped would save him were a forgery.
At his lowest point, he was subjecting himself to all the celebrity humiliations, just to earn a fee and keep his face on TV. We watched him jump through a flaming hoop to land on a bed of roses and play foosball with fly swatters tied to his head.
It’s no surprise to find that he’s been in negotiations repeatedly for a stint in the jungle on I’m a Celebrity, most recently in 2023. It didn’t happen. Perhaps this ruthless documentary was ITV’s revenge.
The drug-dealing Kinsella family in Irish crime drama Kin (BBC1) returns for a double bill, facing money problems that might make Boris himself cringe.
Pictured: Actress Clare Dunne, who plays Amanda in the Irish crime drama Kin on BBC1.
After murdering the son of a Turkish drug dealer, the kind of mishap that can happen to anyone, they found themselves facing a bill of 70 million euros… which would increase to 90 million if they wanted to avoid retaliatory killings.
For that kind of money, even Boris could afford a couple of houses and several children. Kin is a series of violent gangster attacks in which people shoot each other in the head, spread between long and laborious explanations of the plot. The problem is that it’s hard to see why we should care.
Clare Dunne plays Amanda, the most sympathetic character if only because she is trying to have a baby while supplying heroin to the greater Dublin area. Her brother-in-law Eric (Sam Keeley) is a sneering bully and her husband’s father, Frank (Aidan Gillen), is a self-pitying psychopath. And they are the nice ones.
Imagine the Shelby family from Peaky Blinders without the charm or sweet, forgiving nature, and you have the Kinsella clan. It is better to avoid it.