The first attempt to offer the British TV public regular live League football started – and finished – on 10th September 1960 when ITV broadcast the Saturday evening fixture between Blackpool and Bolton. In 1953 those two clubs contested a famous Cup Final but by 1960 they were both struggling in the First Division and the fixture was missing its star player – Stanley Matthews – because of injury. It was a dismal match with poor TV ratings and the following Saturday (17th) Arsenal refused permission for their match against Newcastle to be televised as did Spurs the week after that (24th) for their match against Aston Villa. As a result ITV abandoned the project which was planned to last for 26 matches and nearly a quarter of a century passed before there was another live League match on British TV – Tottenham v Nottingham Forest - on 2nd October 1983. ********* 'Welcome to Match of the Day, the first of a weekly series on BBC 2. This afternoon we are in Beatleville....' So started the first Match of the Day which was broadcast on Saturday August 22nd 1964. Only the highlights of one match was shown - Liverpool v Arsenal - and it's audience on BBC2 was estimated at less than 100,000 because of the difficulty in tuning in to that channel at the time. Two years later it proved popular enough to move to BBC1. The first MOTDs were of course in black and white. The first colour transmission was on 15th November 1969 at Anfield when Liverpool beat West Ham 2-0. At the time colour TVs were still rare so the commentators had to ensure that their commentaries were suitable for viewers with either colour or black and white sets. That caused problems. John Motson once famously said "For those of you watching in black and white, Spurs are in the all-yellow strip” Colemanballs Yet another TV first for Arsenal came at the Emirates on Sunday January 31st 2010. Their 3-1 home Premier League defeat against Manchester United was the world's first live sports event to be broadcast in 3D. The experimental Sky broadcast was beamed to 9 pubs to test the technology and public opinion. *******
Paul Gascoigne is another who should have been kept well away from alcohol before appearing on the box. To be fair when he made an appearance on Question of Sport alcohol was banned. But one of the team captains, Ian Botham, played one of his practical jokes on the footballer and convinced Gazza that Advocat was non-alcoholic and plied him with the drink. By the time Gascoigne realised that it was indeed very alcoholic he was past caring. Gazza and 'Beefy' were in the same team - they finished second!
So, was it the formation of the Premier League in 1992 that did most to change the English game? Or was it the fact that in the same year Sky bought their first TV rights? In what seems like a bargain now they won the right to broadcast live Premier League games for five years for £304 million (later reduced to £190 million because of lack of foreign sales). The first match they televised was Nottingham Forest's 1-0 home victory over Liverpool on Sunday August 16th 1992, the second day of Premier League fixtures. Within 10 years Sky were paying over £1 billion for a three year deal and football was certainly never the same again!
********* Spurs made history in the 1960/61 season when they won the first League/FA Cup double of the 20th Century but their captain, Danny Blanchflower, had made history himself earlier in the season. On February 6th 1961 he became the first person to turn down an invitation from Eamonn Andrews to appear on BBC's This Is Your Life - and he did it live on air! He said 'I consider the programme to be an invasion of privacy.....nobody is going to press gang me into anything.' ********* Seems a long time ago now but do you remember those pre-internet days when to find a latest score or a result the only way you could do it was to get the TV zapper out and go to Teletext?
It's not unusual to see football-related adverts during the commercial breaks but few can really be called classics. Perhaps one of those few is the Ian Rush/who has ever heard of Accrington Stanley ad run by the Milk Marketing Board in the 1980s. An eight-year-old Carl Rice gave Accrington - who had dropped out of the Football League in 1962 - the sort of publicity they never had when they were in the League. Accrington invited Carl to be guest of honour at a match in 2006 and later the same year they won their place back in the Football League. Carl let slip that Accrington weren't the first choice of club names they planned using - the original plan was to use Tottenham Hotspur but that idea was dropped when Spurs objected. But Accrington Stanley was perfect..
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alcohol! Sadly those in charge of the hospitality area prior to George Best appearing on the Wogan chat show in September 1990 didn't think along the same lines. When Best appeared on set he was clearly drunk. What followed was certainly memorable television, although for all the wrong reasons. The conspiracy theorists have it that the BBC intentionally plied him with drink to get the outcome that would give a ratings boost to the Wogan show. Whatever the truth it resulted in a sad episode in the troubled life of a player of genius.
Jimmy Greaves perhaps became as well known for his catchphrase It's a funny old game! as he once was for his deadly goalscoring but it wasn't him who first coined the phrase - well not the real him anyway! From 1984 to 1996 Spitting Image was one of the top comedy shows on TV, featuring puppet caricatures of celebrities of the time with Greaves being one of them. Central TV had the idea of having the real Jimmy Greaves interviewed by his Spitting Image puppet and during the interview it was his puppet that first used the phrase. So perhaps not surprisingly it was the puppet who was the brains behind the phrase rather than the man himself. The voice of the puppet was provided by none other than Harry Enfield.
When Alex Ferguson retired from management he obviously used his time wisely as when his autobiography was published in October 2013 it became a record-breaking seller. By selling 115,547 copies of the book in its first week it became the UK's quickest selling non-fiction book since records began in 1998. Tony Blair's memoirs had only managed to sell 92,000 copies in its first week while even the top Royal best-seller was bettered - Paul Burrell's A Royal Duty only sold 77,000 copies. The only other football book in the top five at the time was David Beckham's autobiography My Side in number 4 spot with sales of 86,000 although to be fair the previous record holder, with 112,000 of first-week sales, did have a football connection. It was Delia, of Norwich City fame, with a cook book!
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