Martin Kelner's Screen Break

Bob Wall's gift as an actor was a very individual one and one, I suspect, not on the syllabus at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Bob could take a kick in the groin better than any other performer you care to mention. If there were an annual award for the ability to wince photogenically as a deftly aimed foot lands between your legs - a pair of little silver-plated gonads on a plinth, perhaps - it would be on Wall's mantelpiece in perpetuity.

Wall's skill in this area earned him roles opposite Bruce Lee in three of Lee's martial arts films. "Bruce was adept at knowing what the Chinese audience wanted," said Wall. "They wanted to see that pain, especially the extra pain of the kick to the groin. He was playing on their feelings of being a people psychologically kicked in the groin for a number of years."

Wall was among a number of movie co-stars and martial arts devotees paying tribute to Lee in an uncritical but diverting documentary on Five, Bruce Lee: Martial Arts Superstar, full of interesting background information on the world's best-known exponent of martial arts. (I did not know for instance that Lee was a child actor known as the Little Dragon and later became the Hong Kong cha-cha champion of 1958.)

The stunt co-ordinator Roderick Woodruff, who wore the permanent frown of a man who knows his working day could involve somersaulting at high speed from a burning vehicle while trying to look like Tom Cruise, felt Lee's skills - on screen, rather than in the Strictly Come Dancing years - were a far more effective tool in action movies than the computer wizardry prevalent today.

Lee's Hong Kong films were rather sniffily dismissed by critics, though, at the time of release and were little seen in the West. Tony Rayns, an Asian film expert, described expeditions to London's outer suburbs to track them down: "I would have to travel to Harlesden, where mine would be the only white face in a black immigrant audience," he said. "But that audience connected with Lee immediately. They loved the films." Possibly because they, too, were familiar with those metaphorical kicks to the nether regions.

Actually Rayns was quite fortunate. I was living in Taunton at the time, where cinema bookers seemed to work on the basis that Somerset's moviegoers were not quite ready for any film without Robin Askwith in it.

Not that I felt deprived on the Bruce Lee front. I was happy to go along with the critical orthodoxy that kung fu movies, as we called them then, were low-brow entertainment unworthy of much critical attention. Frankly, on the evidence of the two films shown on Five's Bruce Lee night, Lee's oeuvre still seems to be of less interest to cineastes than to connoisseurs of the smartly executed kick to the nadgers.

The irony is that, although Lee's martial arts mastery paved the way for the movie stardom he craved - his co-star John Saxon, when asked if Lee was spiritual, said, "Spiritual maybe but I always saw him in a Bentley rather than a monastery" - it is as a sportsman rather than a star of action films that he now seems most influential.

There was some fascinating footage of TV interviews with Lee in which he explained his craft in the kind of terms associated at the time with David Carradine in the nonsensical TV show Kung Fu but which these days seems quite familiar as the language of motivational speakers and sports psychologists. Lee recommended "concentration of energy at a given focus, as at the axis of a wheel, instead of dispersal in scattered activities".

"Wisdom," he maintained, in another of his top gags, "does not consist of trying to wrest the good from the evil but in learning to ride them as a cork adapts itself to the crests and troughs of the waves." Never any danger, then, of confusing Bruce Lee with Gordon.

Lee - Bruce, that is, not Gordon - owned more than 2,500 books on a variety of sports seemingly unrelated to martial arts, with relevant passages highlighted. He was undoubtedly way ahead of his time in the intellectual rigour he applied to his sport. (Come to think of it, he may have been ahead of his time in having a highlighter pen; I don't remember those in the early 70s.)

There are echoes of Lee's thorough and philosophical preparation for a contest in the work these days of an Arsène Wenger or Sven-Goran Eriksson but back then it was Hollywood, in the shape of stars like Steve McQueen and James Coburn, that beat a path to Lee's door, rather than the world of sport.

In Britain, for instance, it was the era of Cloughie and Shankly, and Zen rarely made it off the bench. The classic relaxation technique of the time over here involved the sportsman going out and getting what we in the West call slaughtered with his team-mates.

Bruce Lee's approach, explained in a TV interview, was rather different: "Empty your mind. Be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. Now, water can flow, or it can crash. Be water my friend."

Failing that, a fist of fury to the solar plexus followed by a well-aimed boot in the direction of the wedding tackle should do the trick.