If David Icke ever teams up with Kevin Keegan, the world will be a much more dangerous - and interesting - place. The concluding episode of Channel 4's fascinating Football Stories ran with the terrace chant "There's Only One Kevin Keegan "but left us in no doubt there remain thousands of disciples. As Newcastle's John Beresford proclaimed after he became manager: "It were like the second coming. People thought he could woak on wata'." After his sudden abdication from Tyneside, one fan lamented it was as if "a darkness fell over Newcastle, like."

Decades earlier, he had a similar effect on the good citizens of Hamburg in Germany.

For such an ostensibly serious race, the Germans have excelled at playing the straight man to so many of the downright strange events in history. Half of Hamburg's bright young things, born during Keegan fever in the mid-1970s, now share the Christian name of Kevin. And so many perfectly blond manes were left permanently mangled by efforts to imitate the psychotically curly KK hairdo.

As Bernd Wehmeger confessed, almost tearfully: "People were going into ze barver shop and saying `I vont to look like Kevin Keegan'. I did too. And I feel ashamed for zat."

In retrospect, it is easy to see why. Time has blunted the truly astonishing visual strength of Kev's mop top. It was the afro that James Brown could but dream about, a soft, luxuriant and frankly compelling hairdo. Kev could have smuggled TVs and VCRs from country to country under that mane. Kev could make a football vanish by heading it.

If you took each of the hairstyles favoured by Charlie's Angels at the time and scrunched them into one, you might have ended up with a KK creation. But no earthly barber could have replicated it.

"Ze carls", as Bernd referred to them, were an essential part of Kev in that they concealed or at least distracted one from the pentup, sinewy, owl-eyed little maniac that dwelt beneath them. From a distance - or at least the celestial heights to which his football career took him - Kev looked like the easy-going, goon-natured joker he generally presented himself as.

But a David Attenborough-style expedition beneath the locks revealed a man with a zealot's conviction of where he wanted to go and when. His was truly a pilgrim's progress, an epic ramble which took him from the great seaports of yesteryear such as Liverpool and Southampton to the heart of Germany and back home again.

At each stop, he negotiated record wages for himself and, unforgettably, also negotiated an actual record that made it onto Top of the Tops and was, of course, revered in Germany.

"It was a great song, a simple song," sighed Bernd. "It was a typical song for Kevin Keegan - anyone could whistle it. Or sing."

A tune to be whistled or sung - surely the mark of a classic. But watching Kev croon, looking a dead ringer for Leo Sayer, it was clear that, contrary to there being only one Kevin Keegan, there were at least two, and possibly more. In fact, Whatever Happened]to Kevin Keegan? may have been a more appropriate title.

The young Kevin Keegan presented himself as a smart, searingly honest and progressive individual, albeit one who liked to surround himself with dozens of Old English sheep-dogs, who used moon around the place looking slightly less shaggy than their master. He was savvy, spoke fluent German while in Hamburg and delivered on the field. It was as he got older and wiser that he seemed to loosen his grip on realistic expectation.

When Kev sang, he applied to the task the same wiry self-belief that he brought to the football field. This was a man who thought he could do anything.

Perhaps his exploits on the field made it seem so. His return to Newcastle, which saw ticket sales rise from 10,000 to 36,000, ended with a runaway sprint to promotion. Adored, Keegan did what all the great entertainers do - leave 'em wanting more. He retired at 33. It was at this stage he first began to indulge in the sort of Ickean prophet-speak that has entranced us in more recent years.

"I'd love to have a little bit to do with, well, our destiny, really," he said, reflecting on his future. "I'd not just like to be a politician, I'd like to be prime minister."

On that teaser, he promptly left the game and spent the next seven years perfecting his golf on the Costa Del Sol.

When he returned, again to lead the perennially fallen Newcastle back to the light, he was shorn of his locks but had reinvented himself as a Samson of the spoken word. This was the one aspect of the KK persona the programme did not explore which is a pity, because Keegan's utterances could well prove to be his legacy. Nobody has shown as much talent for malapropisms and logical paradoxes, delightfully unintentional as they all were. They have been collated elsewhere on these pages before and it is impossible to enjoy them without acknowledging they are also the stuff of genius.

Even his emotional outbursts have already entered soccer lore. Newcastle's late collapse against Manchester led to the infamous "I would love it if we beat them now. Love it" speech, which was eclipsed only by his parting words as England manager. There was a cruelty about the circumstances of that resignation, following last year's 1-0 loss to Germany in the last game at Wembley. Spat at by the crowd, at his lowest ebb, KK somehow emerged with knightly dignity with the simple and painful admission "the truth is that Kevin Keegan is just a bit too short for the job."

With that, he left and we await the next coming. Football Stories was right to bow out on the greatest Shaggy Dog Story of all time. And maybe it's true: there is only one Kevin Keegan. Whoever he is.