The best script Peter Bakare has ever written is his own.
Meet the boy taught to play basketball by monks, who unknowingly wrote a series of Skins and competed at London 2012.
He is a barely believable protagonist - an animator, volleyball player, stand-up comedian, businessman, motivational speaker and Olympian.
Bakare taps out every beat with built-in bounce from his base in Milton Keynes, from which he leaps between London and Newcastle.
He talks about life like he’s solving a Rubik’s Cube, never coherent until it’s finished, crunching across a dizzying suite of skills and coincidences.
Bakare was born in Canning Town in the Olympic host borough of Newham, the epicentre of the Games, sandwiched between Stratford’s Park and the ExCeL centre.
He was brought up by a single mother with the help of food parcels from a Franciscan monastery in the area, dished out by ballin’ American monks.
Bakare said: “I still have no idea how they got the ball between their legs while wearing a habit and ran so quickly wearing sandals.
“They were mad about basketball - I was out there playing with them every single day. I had a tough start in life so I was grateful to have people like Father Nicholas around me.
“It was always about good morals and playing hard. They taught me to be a good person and believe I could become something.”
Standing at six foot five, Bakare was never going to be a gymnast. In his late teens his basketball coach introduced him to the sport of volleyball.
He said: “I lost my first three points and I told him ‘nope, people just keep laughing at me.’
“He told me: ‘Peter, whenever you hear yourself saying you can’t, just add one word - yet. Yet means time, yet means practice, yet means belief.’
“I wasn’t good yet so I started practising a bit more, and I got discovered by the England junior team.”
As a child he had a preternatural fascination with video games and their characters that led to a degree in animation at Sheffield Hallam University.
Bakare’s creative bent knew no bounds and while writing for the Tallawah group, was called to a mysterious meeting in a London basement.
Unbeknownst to him it was the start of his entry in the British cultural canon.
He says: “They left me and a total stranger in a room with 60 pages of scripts. Neither of us knew where we were.
“It took me ten minutes to work out that they want us to take notes on them. Before I realised what I was doing, they came back in the room and said, ‘we’d love to hear your thoughts.’
“The lady I was with said, ‘ooh, I loved it! Beginning, middle, end, antagonist, protagonist,’ all the clever words under the sun. They came to me and I had absolutely nothing.
“They just asked me whether I thought I could do any better and I said yes, so they asked me back for another week.
“I was in a room with ten other people and I didn’t know what I was doing. They were on the verge of kicking me off.
“They told me to go back and watch other shows to get some ideas and I saw an advert for Skins. They seemed to be doing the kind of things we wanted to do.
“I came back to the next session and said, ‘this new show Skins looks quite good’ and they told me for the first time, ‘this is Skins. You’re writing Skins.’”
Bakare is particularly proud of his role in shaping Dev Patel’s character Anwar and remains firm friends with Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya, who portrayed Kenneth in early series.
He said: “You could feel the energy and the things we were doing were so different and wacky.
“It’s like the Olympics. You know how big and grand it is but all you’re trying to do is win the game in front of you.
“When you’re so deep in it, you don’t realise the impact. I watch shows now and I’m like, ‘wow, we were radical.’”
Cut back to the sporting world and while studying in Sheffield, Bakare was offered a place on the Great Britain volleyball squad who were based in the city at the English Institute of Sport.
He said: “You had Jessica Ennis training downstairs and Anthony Joshua upstairs. Thinking back it was a bit like Skins.
“We were all young, we were all in the trenches as athletes and these were the first things we were doing.
“You only look back after the Games and realise the magnitude of what we did. We blew up at London 2012. “
Bakare improbably overcame a foot injury to realise his Games dream and took his place in Britain’s first and only Olympic indoor volleyball squad.
The ledger reads five defeats from five for Team GB against the best teams in the world, but Bakare was one of 14 who felt like superheroes for a fortnight.
He said: “Like I did the first time I tried volleyball, my first touch of the ball in 2012 was a mistake and then the coach subbed me off.
“I felt I had nothing to lose after that. I came back on and scored a point, I heard the biggest roar in my life. A flood of energy went through me.
“I tried to play it cool but I landed and just let out this roar. We played like that for about 300 more points. We felt like we were flying.”
One popular misconception about Bakare’s Olympic experience was that he was joined in the British squad by his cousin, Dami Bakare. They share a middle and a last name but are not, in fact, related.
Pausing for the first time in his life, Bakare struggled with life post-London.
He said: “The best way to sum it up is that you get born twice. You’re 27 and your whole identity is that you’re retired.
“I hit rock bottom and they were the toughest years of life.”
Bakare revisited his first passion, animation, and Nutri Troops was born.
The programme aims to teach primary school children about how to live a healthy lifestyle through Olympic-style mascots and interactive games.
It is the essence of Bakare, pathologically incapable of pessimism, changing the world one brilliant smile at a time.
He said: “When we talk about training for the Olympic Games, we talk about the hard work needed to make it.
“There’s one piece missing - the opportunities. Life is really about serendipity.
“You can be a future Olympian and be in the right place and it just never happens for you. I was in the wrong place but someone helped me out. That’s all I want to do.”
Tom Harle, Sportsbeat 2022