I Should Have Been at Work. Des Lynam

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СКАЧАТЬ happy with you and he’s a dangerous enemy.’ I explained my position and I think secretly Cliff admired me for my stance.

      But I still needed an agent, and so I rang my old friend John Motson, who had made a highly successful transition from radio to television a few years earlier. He was using as his agent a chap who was entirely new to the business, a chartered accountant by profession called John Hockey. I went to see John and we formed a pretty good partnership for the next thirteen years.

      But now, what was my role to be in television? Coleman, Bough and Harry Carpenter were filling the main presentational roles, and there were people like David Vine and Tony Gubba, more than capable broadcasters, backing them up. Firstly, I took over a slot called Sportswide, a fifteen-minute programme tacked on the back of the early evening news and magazine programme, Nationwide. Frank Bough, busy man as he was in those days, was also doing the main show, as was Sue Lawley.

      It was fairly seat of the pants stuff. My seat was usually vacated by Frank or Sue, or one of the other Nationwide presenters, a few seconds before I began my piece. The same applied to my producer and director, who almost had to fight their way into position in the gallery.

      I had a couple of early disasters. We used autocue for the programme, unless we were at an outside broadcast, and the system in those pre-computer days was pretty basic. One was actually reading from a roll of paper rather like a narrow toilet roll; sometimes it became detached and one had to adjust quickly to the script on one’s lap and/or hope you could remember the lines. On one occasion the operator had typed the same paragraph twice. I hadn’t had a chance to spot it before going on air and was halfway through repeating myself, word for word, when I had the presence of mind to say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m repeating myself’ and got away with it.

      Sometimes we would record part of the slot and I would link in and out of it ‘live’. The recorded insert would include me in vision. On one occasion the make-up girl, seeing that my hair was too long before the live part of the programme, suggested ‘tidying up my ends’. Like a fool I let her do it, and she went a bit over the top. The viewer at home saw me with short hair, then long hair, then short hair again, all in the same broadcast.

      On another occasion somebody stopped the videotape machine for the recorded section of me in vision and the director cut back to me live. The viewer must have thought I’d had a stroke and then recovered. It was all great experience for bigger and, in a way, easier things to come.

      Since my move from radio, I had also been doing a little stand-in presentation on Grandstand, as well as helping out when the first London Marathon took place in 1981. My role would be to run back and forth over Tower Bridge and interview some of the slower runners ‘on the hoof’.

      Of course it was the beginning of a fabulous event, the dream of Chris Brasher and John Disley, which has caught the public’s imagination so dramatically. Now everybody could become a marathon runner, not just those supermen we watched in awe at the Olympic Games. On the day, I ran across the bridge and back maybe thirty times. I might as well have run in the event itself and bitterly regret that I didn’t give it a go when my fitness was rather better than it is now.

      Another year I was doing interviews with the finishers and posed one of the dumbest questions of all time. I asked Grete Waitz, the great Norwegian athlete, if she had been pleased with her time: she had just broken the world’s best time for the event, but I didn’t know. My monitor had been on the blink and somehow the director didn’t get the information to me. To viewers, I must have seemed like a right dope.

      Presenting a show like Grandstand is quite demanding, particularly so when the presentation is at an event, sometimes in the wind and rain, trying to listen to talkback instructions with a load of ambient noise going on around you. The studio-based shows were more comfortable, and the technicalities more reliable; nonetheless, five hours live on air, and sometime for much longer during the Olympics or other big events, make considerable demands on both mind and body.

      I used to be able to get through the five hours, often without having to go to the toilet. I couldn’t do it now. Food was taken on board as the programme went out. I was caught with a mouthful of sandwich on more than one occasion when an event finished abruptly or when the studio director cut back to me suddenly.

      The winter programmes, when there was a full football fixture list, involved the presenter commentating on the results as they came in – originally on the teleprinter, later the videprinter. I thoroughly enjoyed this part of the show, exercising my knowledge of players and league positions and sequences of victories or defeats. I usually spent one day a week honing that knowledge: as a supporter of one of the smaller clubs myself, I knew how important these small facts and figures were to the fans around the country, from Aberdeen to Exeter.

      Occasionally, with your mind racing, you would make the odd mistake, relying on the editor to correct you. Once I said, ‘Southampton won 2–0, the same result as last year when they won 4–1.’ During the videprinter sequence, we would go live to the grounds for reports from key matches. John Philips, the editor, would sometimes forget to tell me where we were going next and I would prompt him through the viewer. ‘Now where shall we go to next?’ I would say down the camera lens, and Philips would then tell me, ‘Highbury, you prat’, or he would simply tell me to keep talking till they had a reporter on the line. It was fast-moving stuff. Nowadays, Sky Television build a whole programme around scores and results information. It is skilfully presented by Jeff Stelling, in my view their best sports broadcaster by miles. I can see the buzz he gets out of the show. It used to be the same for me.

      Martin Hopkins, who directed nearly every Grandstand show I did, was an avid racing man. The custom was that he and the presenter would have a head to head bet on each race we were televising. He invariably won but it kept his interest at a peak.

      For some of the years I was doing the show, the whole production team had to prepare quickly a five-minute sports bulletin for the South-East region. There were no reports or live action in this. The presenter simply read the copy put in front of him and hoped that the captions and still pictures fitted. Quite often they did not, and this became just about the hairiest programme that the sports department produced. Mostly, I managed to get out of it, and the broadcast was left to one of the newer faces; but those five minutes were always considerably more difficult than the five hours that had gone before.

      While I found Grandstand challenging, presenting it always felt like it was something that came naturally to me. Around this time, I was asked to try something that really, really didn’t come naturally. Not a lot of people know this, but for a time I tried my hand, or voice, at the art of football commentary with BBC Television. Now I was asked to do a test commentary. It was not an ambition of mine but Alec Weeks, the senior football director, and Mike Murphy, the Match of the Day editor, who eventually became my Grandstand boss, thought I would be a useful addition to the commentary team behind John Motson and Barry Davies.

      My first attempt was a trial commentary at an international match at Wembley between England and Wales. I did my homework and found the job relatively simple. Football commentary is easy. It’s good football commentary that’s difficult. Weeks wrote to me afterwards. ‘Your voice is clear. You have a wide range, your identification is sharp but your timing is appalling. We might get somewhere if we persevered on a few matches next season.’ We must have persevered because I was booked to do my first match for real a few weeks later. The game was Bristol City against Wolves in the old First Division. Only about four minutes went out on Match of the Day, but the edit was awful – or rather it underlined my lack of technique as I was heard to repeat the same phrase over and over. The match editor had not really been very sympathetic to the new boy. I did a little better as I went along and began getting some big games. I remember being at Maine Road for Manchester City against Liverpool, and I also commentated on some other top matches. And I СКАЧАТЬ