They waited 45 years to make a movie about Elvis Presley yet barely six months to start filming “Warnie”.

“Obscene” is my first reaction. No matter the fascination with the late spin master, it’s too early.

That’s not the same as saying there’s no script there.

There’s a 16-part series for each of the magnetic years that Shane Warne ruled Test cricket and lived on the rollercoaster of life. You’d throw in Episodes 17 and 18 on the IPL caravan in India, the BBL, commentary capers, family and other adventures. Forgive me but isn’t that called following his career in real life in real time.

The rush to get actors to play real life characters we know so well has a weirdness to it that I can’t quite get my head around.

Are we all so lacking in attention span that we need a two-part mini-series to give a 60 per cent truth take on his life with all the fake-for-TV exclamation marks?

Spare me. No matter how good these actors are, they will be delivering pale impressions of technicolor Shane.

Certainly, no actor put his hand up to bowl a copycat flipper or a wickedly dipping, fizzing leg break to bowl Mike Gatting as happened 30 years ago on the 1993 Ashes tour.

We’ve been waiting 15 years for a real Australian cricketer to do that with only spluttering success.

Actor Gary Sweet got his big break playing the young Donald Bradman in the 1984 mini-series Bodyline when “The Don” was still alive and in his 70s.

The series won a huge following even if the actor playing English fast bowler Harold Larwood seemed to never bowl above 50km per hour.

The great Bodyline controversy of 1932-33, the trappings of cricket and having the wonderful voice of ABC icon Norman May commentating made for an engaging delve into a seminal moment in cricket history.

Sweet actually looked like he could wield a bat and the director cleverly used lots of close-ups to limit analysis of technical flaws.

Larwood’s high-cut boots, the original Sydney Cricket Ground scoreboard back in use, the same ground’s iconic Member’s Stand, bats without stickers, those old green rubber-spiked batting gloves, men in unbranded whites, 1930s fashions…the trappings were rich and appealing.

Tall beers in the press box during play…now that was stretching things way too far.

Bodyline was, firstly, pitching a great story not a television textbook on how to play a cover drive or bowl an outswinger.

The same theory was behind 2012’s Howzat! Kerry Packer’s War which delved into World Series Cricket erupting in the 1970s.

We could all have faced the tame thunderbolts of the actor who turned Jeff Thomson into a figure less scary than a veteran New Farm lawn bowler.

Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh had the right moustaches, Ian Chappell swore a lot but not enough and Doug Walters could have been Kevvie Walters.

The winner was Lachy Hulme who gave a towering performance as media mogul Kerry Packer. It helped greatly that many of us knew little of Packer publically so Hulme was able to paint a fresh picture of a bulldozing character.

A Warnie mini-series? Don’t we still know the real person too well to have to wince at watching a bottle-blond imitation on our screens?

One thing is rock solid. Warnie would have revelled in the start to the current Ashes series.

The drama of the First Test at Edgbaston was riveting. Like the best of sport, it’s always better than any script you could concoct. We even have a villain for the summer in Ollie Robinson, even though the Pom paceman’s sledging words were merely good theatre and less than a score of Aussies have uttered.

Warne, the leggie, would have loved watching English batsmen charging him under the cult of “Bazball.” Joe Root wouldn’t have been the only batsman stumped by a mile as if he’d ignored the warning at every Tube station, “Mind The Gap.”

Warne, the commentator, would have called out the English bollocks being spruiked.

For 100 years, batsmen like Joe Root (46) and Harry Brook (46) getting out in the 40s would have been called as wasting starts when centuries were needed.

Warne would have shot down the “bold, fearless, just-what-was-needed” drivel from English commentators like Kevin Pietersen.

Perhaps, there was a sports movie already made about that…Rocky II. All the talk came from Apollo Creed but the winning punch came from Rocky.

The Aussies won a thriller and head to Lord’s on Wednesday for the Second Test at the most storied of venues.

For the record, filmdom has a wonderful roll call of sports biopics and fictional sports stories.

If you haven’t seen this magnificent seven, you are missing out…Raging Bull (1980), The Pride of the Yankees (1942), Chariots of Fire (1981), Bull Durham (1988), Field of Dreams (1989), Moneyball (2011) and Jerry Maguire (1996).

OK, King Richard (2021) is worth a watch too and Munich (2005) had to be made.

It’s not always the case that film imitates life. Real life can imitate film. Since that fictional baseball field was built in an Iowa corn field by the Kevin Costner character in Field of Dreams, the mystique has grown.

In 2021, Major League Baseball played a Field of Dreams game in a small, temporary ball park beside the movie site between the New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox.

Costner even led the modern players from the cornfield onto the diamond to play ball. It was such a success that millions are being spent on a permanent field.

The Pride of the Yankees celebrated the too-brief life of baseball legend Lou Gehrig, who died at 37 from the same devastating motor neurone disease (MND) that grips AFL great Neale Daniher.

There was a Babe Ruth character to be played in The Pride of the Yankees movie beside actor Gary Cooper’s portrayal of Gehrig.

Who to cast in the shoes of the greatest of baseballers? Ruth played the role in the film himself.

The one character who could play Warnie is sadly gone from us. An actor playing a role in a mini-series isn’t going to make the batting order in my third XI.

JIM TUCKER has specialised in sport, the wider impacts and features for most of his 40 years writing in the media. He’s watched Field of Dreams four times.