NEARLY 40 years ago, Michael Cooper – known then and now as Mini – “starred” in a BBC Inside Out documentary filmed at Aycliffe Assessment Centre, in County Durham. He was 11 and the documentary provoked strong public reaction. It was made by Norton-born filmmaker Franc Roddam who has remained a friend and supporter of Mini ever since.

Mini has spent the past four decades in and out of jails, secure mental health units and halfway houses. He’s now out on licence after receiving a life sentence for setting fire to a drinks factory.

When he ran away, he usually turned up at Roddam’s London home. Now he has, with the encouragement of the film-maker, written his autobiography Mini and Me.

BBC4 offers a chance to see the original 1975 documentary tonight in Mini: A Life Revisited – and catch up with Mini.

Alan Yentob will be quizzing him on how he’s channelled his experiences into the book.

Roddam, who made TV’s first fly-on-the-wall reality series The Family and later feature films including Quadrophenia, feels writing the book allowed the superbright ten-year-old boy he first met to return. “Forty years ago they said he’s dangerous, he’s difficult, he’s troublesome,” he says. “When this book was completed I thought it was brilliant for Mini because he became the intelligent person he was when he was ten.

“I saw him when he first came out after the long prison stretch and was a bit shocked, to be honest, because he was this older man who’d been beaten up and institutionalised for 30 years. Where was this little boy? The book is returning him to his strength.”

  • Mini: A Life Revisited is on BBC4, 10pm. Press the red button at 11pm to see 40 Minutes: Johnny Oddball, a 1985 follow-up to the original documentary.
     
  • Mini and Me is published by Ziji, £11.99