HE DRANK on duty, punched employees, called journalists "shithouses", produced classic one-liners and was rumoured to like a bung . . . but he got results. No, not Gene Hunt from Life on Mars, but another '70s icon, Brian Clough.

Playing the Sam Tyler role here is Duncan Hamilton, a teenage reporter on the Nottingham Evening Post, thrust into 20 years of "spurious intimacy" with the Nottingham Forest manager.

Readers of David Peace's novel The Damned Utd, set in 1974, will be familiar with Clough's boozy, brilliant, bombastic world.

Hamilton's reality is just as entertaining. At their first meeting, Clough insists they drink Scotch at 9.30am. When Hamilton writes that Forest's morale has dived, he is paraded before the team and told by Clough: "You're banned for ever from this ground.

Forever!" Two days later, Clough phones Hamilton: "Where are you, shithouse? I've got a story for you.

Fancy a glass of champagne?"

Slowly, Clough becomes "like me Dad". On hearing the young man's stammer, Clough offers to phone him every day for a fortnight to help cure it.

Clough's style was always to be unpredictable, to ignore tactics, to buy good players and to relax them. When Clough finds Hamilton reading Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he says: "I don't need a boring book by Freud to show me how to do all that. . . it only takes seconds to change someone's outlook with a word or two."

Forest win two European Cups, but by 1993 Hamilton is watching "the disintegration of a man as well as a team". It's compulsive reading. Clough is hopelessly unable to cope with the gay Justin Fashanu. We see a blotchy-faced, alcoholic manager agonising over the non-signing of Stan Collymore.

After Clough retires, Hamilton gives up football writing. Yet, in 2004, when he hears of Clough's death, he is in tears. He regrets that "Clough the vaudevillean obscures Clough the master manager", and forgives his faults because he "cared about the spirit of football and the need to play the game stylishly and without cynicism." Hamilton discovers that sport "stays with us like characters from a great novel.

There was proof of that for me on cards pinned to the many bunches of flowers left at Nottingham Forest ."

And what would Clough think of this life of Brian? Not bad for a shithouse.

'Hammers in the Heart' by Pete May is published by Mainstream