SAIN T MEET SAINT & GREAVSIE GREAVSIE
If you were to choose the perfect time in broadcast history to launch a football television show, you couldn’t do much worse than the autumn of 1985. Not only was the game reeling from disasters at both Bradford and Heysel, and the European ban from the latter, but there wasn’t even a TV deal – not even for a highlights round-up. Football feared too much coverage could kill the game’s rapidly dwindling fanbase, while TV was hardly falling over itself to publicise a pariah game.
As head of ITV Sport John Bromley bristled, “They have hooligans kicking each other on the terraces, lousy facilities, boring players… and they say it’s TV’s fault nobody goes to the game any more.” But his department was about to pull a masterstroke that would, in its own way, change football coverage forever.
Watched nowadays on YouTube, the show is more time capsule than revolution. After some cheesy intro graphics, two ex-pros sit behind a plywood studio desk and chummily discuss the week’s talking points. They might video-interview a manager, then introduce pre-recorded packages of highlights and club focuses, each prompting more desk-based chat and golf club chuckling.
But this, remember, was a very different era. It’s now possible to gorge on so much TV football that you’ll earn a gold card from Deliveroo, but in the mid-80s it was famine rather than feast. started its seven-year run as one of just two regular football programmes and ended it on the cusp of the Sky era. It pioneered or perfected much that now defines football coverage.
