Sitting in a leather armchair and holding an iPad, Will Carling is reliving his rugby nightmare. At least this time the former England captain is able to do so with a smile on his face. Of sorts.

At times the smile gives way to a wince as Carling remembers the destruction that was wreaked on England’s World Cup hopes by a 20-year-old Jonah Lomu in the semi-final defeat by New Zealand in Cape Town in 1995.

But Carling is not just watching a rerun of the footage, but also hearing for the first time Lomu’s description of what happened by the man himself, nine years after his tragic death at the age of 40 from a heart attack associated with the kidney condition nephrotic syndrome. It is one of a number of compelling and moving moments in a superb new documentary called Lomu: The Lost Tapes.

Carling at least takes solace from the fact that Lomu’s stunning four-try display was from a different world. At 6ft 4in and weighing almost 19st but with a 100-metre sprint time of around 11 seconds, Lomu not only revolutionised wing play but emerged from the World Cup as rugby’s first global superstar.

“Your eyes went up and over this sort of colossus and you were trying not to show any reaction on your face,” recalled Carling of the moment he first came face-to-face with Lomu in the tunnel at Newlands.

“You watched him on TV was one thing and then coming up against him in real life was just something else,” recalls Carling. “He was big. He had a presence. It was just phenomenal.

“We just decided that we’d treat him like a normal player, which worked well… Trouble was he was faster and just about three times the size of a normal winger.”

What Carling and England could not have known then was that the great man had also been fired up by comments made by Tony Underwood in a pre-match interview and then seeing his opposite number wink at him during the haka.

“The first passage said, ‘I am going to run rings around him’,” Lomu says. “I was getting angrier and angrier by the minute. ‘He’s going to run around you, run around you… It kept winding me up, winding me up every time.

“We had just finished the haka and I had jumped up in the air and I was looking at him and he gave me ‘the wink’. Just as I landed, the first thing that came into my head was, ‘I’m going to wipe that wink off your face’.”

The rest is history. Lomu set the tone for a humiliating 45-29 victory by ploughing into Carling and Tony Underwood from the kick-off and then famously trampled over Mike Catt to score the first of four tries after just two minutes.

“All I remember was that Will almost tipped me over,” Lomu says. “I was stumbling along and just as I got my balance, I could see Mike Catt in front of me. All I knew was that I am just going to have to run straight into him because I can’t step. I could see the try line and I knew I couldn’t take another step, so I had to jump. I couldn’t get over that I was over the line.”

Credit: Lomu: The Lost Tapes, TNT Sports / World Rugby

Credit: Lomu: The Lost Tapes, TNT Sports / World Rugby

It was the moment when Carling realised the full extent of the trouble England were in, having fatally underestimated Lomu’s threat.

“I remember trying to tap tackle him and it is quite a heavy leg. I thought it would bring him down, but I think that was the warning where it was like, ‘If we leave him one-on-one, we are going to be in trouble’. It was crazy, our defence used to do OK, and it just made it look ridiculous.”

Lomu was unstoppable, demolishing a side who had travelled to South Africa with high hopes of winning the World Cup, “I was willing to do anything,” Lomu said. “I was basically in another zone; I had virtually taken my game to another level. I could run into a brick wall that day.”

The exchange is what makes this hour-long documentary, produced by All3Media’s 3 Rock Productions for TNT Sports, unique. It is nine years since the Lomu’s death following his battle with the kidney condition first diagnosed in 1995, yet the film has been able to draw upon more than 10 hours of previously unseen footage of Lomu from interviews conducted by rugby journalist Mark Souster 20 years ago..

It not only captures golden moments showing the man behind the rugby icon, but also creates ‘conversations’ by inviting key players like Carling, Underwood, former team-mates Frank Bunce and Eric Rush, and Lomu’s second wife Fiona, to comment and reflect on his life as they are shown the footage for the first time themselves.

Craig Doyle, the TNT rugby presenter who set up 3 Rock Productions with former Ireland and British and Irish Lions captain Brian O’Driscoll, remembers the moment he knew that they had struck gold.

“Mark contacted me two-and-a-half years ago and we met for a coffee in Bath,” recalls Doyle. “He was frustrated by the fact that the world didn’t want to know about Jonah Lomu and they didn’t understand the importance of these tapes. There was a look in Mark’s eyes. He had lived this period with Jonah that no one else had really got to do all those years ago.

“He said he had a box of Lomu tapes but nobody wanted them. And I just thought, ‘That’s nuts’. I rang Brian and said, ‘I think we have got something’. He said, ‘I know, I can hear it in your voice’. A couple of hours later the email arrived – the VHS tapes had been digitised – and I blocked out the world and started watching. Honestly, I could not believe what I was seeing.

“I hadn’t been working in rugby at the time and only saw Jonah like most people, this huge man mountain ripping up defences. And here I was watching this caring, soft man playing with his dog at Eden Park and just running around like a kid. Then I clicked on footage of him talking about his cars and driving and I don’t know where from, but my tears just started flowing. There was something so innocent about it, the juxtaposition of this beast on the field and this really normal young man enjoying simple things with the money he made.

“I was excited and nervous because I felt a real responsibility to tell someone’s life story when they are not around any more, because they can’t argue against it.”

After transcribing the tapes, the production team put together what Doyle describes as a novel “to tell his story of that era and most of his back story and keep him as a narrator of his own life. It was always going to be beyond the grave. Jonah from beyond the grave”.

“Jonah leads the whole documentary, that is what is so eerie about it. We weren’t putting words in people’s minds, we just said, ‘Watch this’.

“These are conversations that have never been had. Jonah and Tony Underwood had the chat about the wink, about the haka and that game in this documentary, because what we did is played Jonah talking about it and then Tony’s reaction to it. It is really special.

“In the latter years he used to wear a bandage around his bicep. People thought it was an injury but it was covering the cannula mark from his treatment for his kidney.”

For O’Driscoll, who played against Lomu three times, and knows more than most the demands of being in the public eye, the insight came from seeing the real Jonah Lomu, revealing what it was like to be thrust into the world stage and how he had to cope with the kidney disorder that required a transplant but still wanted to play on.

“It is now almost 30 years since he broke out onto the scene and he is still the name in rugby,” said O’Driscoll. “Antoine Dupont is trying to get into the conversation but Lomu has had the biggest single impact in the game, certainly in my lifetime, by a country mile.

“Having access to this footage of the real him. Sometimes we play a role, when you are representing a team or are a captain, you can’t really be yourself because you are on show. You have to be a role model – ‘I should say this, or act like this’. With these tapes we got to see Jonah as himself behind the scenes – understanding the individual, not the person on a Saturday afternoon.”

For that reason, the highlights are not replays of the thunderous display in Cape Town but seeing Lomu dancing to Barry White music at the back of one of his many trucks, hearing Fiona talk movingly about the gentle giant who feared he would be dead by 50, and delivering a line that was played over footage of his funeral.

“When your day is up, your day is up, all you can do is play the best game of your life,” said Lomu. And what a game he played.

Lomu: The Lost Tapes premieres free-to-air on Quest at 11pm on October 31st, and is available to view on TNT Sports 1 on November 1st and to stream on-demand on discovery+ from November 2nd.