Eric Cantona takes a little bit le pipi

Joey Barton signs for Marseille and Eric le Magnifique does what he can to maintain the 'entente cordiale.'

Here’s a piece I wrote in The Guardian in the Screen Break series back in the ‘90s and early 2000s. It would have sunk into the obscurity it probably richly deserves, but Dave Rainey, one of our tiny cache of paying customers rescued it from the Guardian archives. Here’s the piece…..

Full marks to Joey Barton for his amusing Franglais act in Marseille. Who knows, the famous British sense of humour, of which Joey is such a reliable representative, may help his host nation unbend a little. One hesitates to traduce a whole country, especially one as large and diverse as France, with 265 kinds of cheese as General De Gaulle himself pointed out, and one accepts that xenophobia is not what is expected from Britain's leading liberal newspaper, but really, the French.

Are they all that? They seem to think so. A woman called Geraldine Lepere has a website underlining differences between us and them, and far from saying vive to les différences, seems to be coming down very firmly on her side of the Manche. Diplomatically, she says she struggled with cultural misunderstandings when she moved to live and work in Leeds – me too, and I'm from Manchester – and set up her site partly to help us adapt to France's higher standards of behaviour.

Geraldine is not the first to suggest we can learn from them. Books like French Women Don't Get Fat and French Children Don't Throw Food made those of us who like to go down to Greggs and buy our kids pasties to sling at each other thoroughly ashamed. On the other hand, our friends across the water can sometimes be a little, er, up themselves, as I believe the expression goes.

As evidence I cite a programme on MUTV called La Philosophie de Cantona, which the channel has been repeating at regular intervals. "Listen, my British students, I'll tell you something very deep now," said the presenter, "Art and life are inextricably interwoven, like art and football. The beautiful game is one of the highest forms of art, and had a huge influence on Eric's personal …"

Eric's personal what was not specified, but when I reveal the speaker as Antoine de Caunes, a'mugging and a'shrugging wildly like Maurice Chevalier's hyperactive nephew, a style that became familiar in his 1990s heyday fronting the TV show Eurotrash, it will not surprise you that his meaning sometimes got lost.

De Caunes, who used to share the Eurotrash limelight either with half-naked models with unfeasibly large breasts or with two cardboard giraffes made from toilet paper tubes, and brought us such timeless features as rabbit showjumping and Naked Germans of the Week, was a wacky choice for a programme that did not wear its pretensions lightly.

The programme was subtitled The Art of Rebellion (Pretentious? Nous?) and presented in chapters with titles including Roots and Religion, Hedonism and Heroism, and Death and the Afterlife. Its saving grace was that Eric himself gave every impression of taking le pipi, as he often did during his playing days here. It was why you did not have to be a Manchester United supporter to love him.

When Antoine put it to him that he was a rebel, Eric responded: "If you are in a war zone, you can be a rebel. You can be called a rebel if you put your life in danger, if you put your family in danger. Me, I live in France, I play in England, I've been a lucky man."

Cantona was interviewed in an empty theatre, possibly in a bid to justify De Caunes' description of him as "footballer, actor, icon, political activist". Hmmm. The jury has sent out for lunch while it continues to mull over the "actor" tag. Admittedly, I haven't seen much of Eric's theatre work, but did endure one of his early cameos in the film Elizabeth, which was at the very least un petit peu de bois, as those fluent in Franglais might put it.

Ken Loach, who directed Cantona in Looking For Eric, spoke highly of him, mind you. The programme implied that Loach was the kind of father figure Eric latched on to – mutual respect being the key – and without whom his various careers would not have flourished. Guy Roux, manager at Auxerre, where Cantona made his name, and Sir Alex Ferguson, were two such figures. "Sir Alex made something for me," said Eric.

The footballer's former United team-mates queued up to stress that the Frenchman reciprocated. David Beckham said Cantona was one of the most hardworking trainers he had ever seen, and in an interesting echo of Mademoiselle Lepere's website, Gary Neville told the programme, "You never wanted to let Eric down. You worked hard to make sure you could live up to his standards."

Eric's brio – as we call it in the UK – actually made the show quite watchable. His final message for everyone back in Manchester was typical: "Keep singing my name, because me, I will never forget you." And the great man, who I believe even the staunchest Francophobe can sign up to, expressed his undying love for his adopted city, hefty women, unruly kids and all.

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If you enjoy this old stuff, exciting news! I have remarkably managed to secure some unsold copies of my hit book Wrestling In Honey, which is full of this sort of stuff alongside a bit of memoir at least as reliable as The Salt Path, and in a bid to offer something extra to our paying customers I shall be holding a draw at the end of each month and picking out two winners, each of whom will receive a copy of the volume, many of which are thrillingly unsigned. So if you were wavering over the £3.50 a month investment, now might be the time to take the plunge. My publishers, Scratching Shed, say they may also be able to offer as prizes some of their other books, which cover such varied subjects as Leeds United, rugby league, and Jake Thackray.