IT’S all over for Steve Brookstein, whose shot at glory and a place in the pro-celebrity football annals failed to get over the ten-man wall of the public phone vote, leaving the 36-year-old singer and left-side midfield player “gutted� and on his way home in a courtesy car.
Then again, as Brookstein was candid enough to admit, in a sombre post-eviction interview with Zoe Ball and Mark Durden-Smith on The Match: “I was pants.� And pants will get you nowhere at this level.

Still, it sends out a clear message to the rest of the squad. It doesn’t matter who you are. Like Brookstein, you can be the winner of the first series of The X-Factor. You can be a former middleweight boxing champion, like Nigel Benn (booted out at the trials). You may even, like Jim Alexander (also evicted this week), have appeared up a ladder on London’s Burning. But it will guarantee you nothing in the pro-celebrity game. It’s what you do when the ball is at your feet. At which point, it’s cut it or get cut.

The general feeling about Brookstein was that he had failed to gel with the rest of the squad. Solo singers rarely do. He may well also reflect that the bacon rolls didn’t help. Graham Taylor, the manager, is rightly exercising a tight control over diet in the run-up to Sunday’s match against the Legends, reasoning that a team containing John Barnes and Peter Reid could well be vulnerable on the counter-attack to a team who are younger, leaner and, perhaps literally, more hungry. Thus, breakfast most mornings for the celebrities at the academy appears to be a kiwi fruit, with an optional banana if they are lucky.

This menu disappointed Brookstein, who promptly invaded the production area and helped himself to some supplementary starch from the wide selection made available to the camera crew. The set of a reality show, of course, is an unwise place to attempt to do anything unnoticed. Accordingly, word (and, indeed, pictures) soon got back to Taylor, who was no more pleased to hear about Brookstein and the bacon than Glenn Hoddle was to learn about Paul Gascoigne and the kebab back in 1998. From then on, Brookstein’s card was marked. With grease, possibly.

What now, though, for the grizzled crooner with the cheeky smile? He is 37 next month, so one must assume that his best celebrity football days are behind him. Presumably he could seek a pro-celebrity coaching role. Or there is always pro-celebrity media work. Beyond that, though, the options seem worryingly narrow. Unless, of course, he falls back on the singing. Positively, in this area, Brookstein’s Let’s Stay Together, at the celebrities’ karaoke night, was undeniably the evening’s stand-out performance. It was also, as it turned out, a poignant plea that was destined to be ignored. But that’s reality television for you.

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