If Sir Alan Parker ever felt the urge to shoot a Horatio Alger story, charting the hero's journey from working-class upstart to establishment lion, then the rough draft is sitting right under his nose.
The protagonist starts out as a chippy young hooligan, purple-faced beneath a pageboy haircut. He winds up white-haired and well-upholstered, a pillar of whatever passes for the British film industry these days. To misquote John Huston in Chinatown: "Politicians, whores and Alan Parker. They all get respectable if they stick around long enough."
Parker has directed some decent, clamorous pictures (Bugsy Malone, Mississippi Burning, The Commitments) and some dodgy, clamorous pictures (Evita, Midnight Express, Angela's Ashes). He is a knight of the realm and a former chairman of the now defunct UK Film Council.
And yet the CV tells us only half the story. Because Parker, in his pomp, was a vandal, an agitator, a necessary evil. On balance I think I love him more for what he tore down than what he built in its place; for what he represents as opposed to what he achieved.
The director burst on to the scene in the late 1970s, the closest thing the industry had to a punk-rock gobshite, even if his aesthetic was ultimately more Sham 69 than Sex Pistols.
He came trailing what he has referred to as "an impure past" as a council-estate kid, shut out of the traditional Oxbridge/BBC route, who learned his craft in advertising instead.
Parker hated pretty much everything: critics, the British Film Institute and Merchant-Ivory movies, which he dismissed as "the Laura Ashley school of film-making". He wanted to gatecrash the system and do things differently. Against the odds, his dreams came true.
Who cares if the Alan Parker story ended up generating more heat than light? Today, perhaps more than ever, he stands as an inspiration for every ambitious young British film-maker of limited means. He is an object lesson in how bullish self-confidence and a loud voice can overturn applecarts and shatter glass ceilings. For that, and that alone, he deserves whatever award Bafta cares to throw his way.
