Читать книгу I Should Have Been at Work - Des Lynam - Страница 11

I had been broadcasting on national radio for less than three years when I got a call from someone in BBC Television inviting me to stand in for Frank Bough for four weeks, presenting the Sunday cricket on BBC 2. I explained that cricket was not a special interest of mine in a broadcasting sense. Although I had loved to play the game as a boy, I did not keep up to date with the details of the game in the way I did with many other sports. I was certainly not an expert.

I was told that the job would be simply to ‘top and tail’ the broadcasts and read the scores from other games. It seemed a simple enough task and I agreed to do it. It turned out to be pretty much of a disaster. It rained at all the matches I attended and I was a shuffling nervous wreck as I tried to get the words out to camera. I felt totally ill at ease.

The late, great John Arlott was involved in some of the broadcasts, and it has to be said that he was not overly welcoming. I didn’t particularly blame him. He was hugely famous; I was a raw broadcasting newcomer in comparison. Not for me this television lark, I thought, and I scuttled back to the safety of my radio microphone and ventured nowhere near a television camera again for several years. I had actually received a nice letter from the producer, Bill Taylor, who thanked me for my efforts and thought I managed extremely well. I think he was just being kind.

As time went by, though, people in the business kept telling me I should have another go at television. I was happy doing Sports Report, and my boxing commentaries: by now I had covered the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ in Zaire, the Olympic Games in Munich and the Commonwealth Games in New Zealand; presented the Today programme; and had my own Radio 2 weekly music show, After Seven. I was a busy and successful radio broadcaster. Nonetheless, other people’s ambitions for me were beginning to sway me towards the possibility of doing television. I had put the cricket disasters to the back of my mind by now and had completed a short series of television quiz shows for BBC Northern Ireland. One day I found myself applying for a job with Southern Television (a forerunner to Meridian) to be their sports reporter. I duly sped off to their studios in Southampton, where I was interviewed and given an audition. A few days later I was notified that the job was mine. I would give three months’ notice to the BBC and off I would go to become a regional TV ‘face’.

I went to see Cliff Morgan, the legendary former Welsh rugby union star, who by this time had enjoyed a long career at the BBC and was the Head of BBC Radio Sport and Outside Broadcasts.

‘Cliff,’ I said, ‘I have decided to take the plunge towards television and I think that working on a regional basis would give me the appropriate lower profile in which to learn something about the craft. Then I will find out if I could ever do the business at a national level, hopefully with the BBC. It’s a gamble, but it’s one I have decided to take.’ I must have sounded a pretentious little twit.

‘Lynam,’ he said, ‘you haven’t got the sense you were born with. Here you are making a name for yourself in radio. You’re having brilliant experience covering all the big events. You’ll end up reporting Bournemouth and bloody Boscombe Athletic. I’ll tell you when it’s time for you to make your television move and it’ll be national television, not piddling about on the Isle of Wight.’ Cliff was not being disparaging about those charming areas of the South Coast; he was merely using his graphic language to dissuade me from my intentions.

He was a very persuasive boss, was Cliff, as well as being one of the major influences in my broadcasting life. He remains a dear friend and I am proud and privileged to have known him. Ironically, he now lives on the Isle of Wight, where, sadly, he has not been enjoying the best of health.

The outcome of our conversation was that I telephoned Southern Television and told them I wasn’t taking the job. They were not best pleased with me. It would be another twenty-three years before I did make my move to ITV.

Some time later, Cliff, who had moved back to television, fixed me up with the chance to present two days’ racing at the Grand National meeting, on the Thursday and Friday before the big day itself. Once again I felt less than comfortable. Nowadays I envy those young presenters on satellite television who get their break reading the sports news off an autocue in front of a minimal audience. At least they have the time to get used to a TV camera up their snout. I was out in the wind and rain of Aintree, notes blowing all over the place, desperately trying to remember where I was, who I was, and what the hell I was doing there. By the Friday night I had convinced myself that live television was not for me, and was tempted to write to Southern Television to tell them what a lucky escape they had had. Once again, though, I received a very kind note, this time from the Head of BBC Television Sport, Alan Hart. He thanked me for making what he thought had been ‘a first-class contribution to the programmes’ and wrote that it was the opinion of everyone in his department, not just his. He also mentioned that if I felt disposed to appear on the box again, I should ring him and arrange lunch. I didn’t, and I didn’t. I would not in my wildest dreams have thought then that I would have ended up presenting the Grand National broadcast, one of the most prestigious and difficult events that BBC Television covers, for fifteen years running.

I didn’t call Alan but amazingly enough later in that year, 1977, he called me. He said he had been discussing me with Cliff and that he and I should meet, which we did at the Chelsea home of the racing commentator Julian Wilson. Over lunch, Alan spelled out that he thought – despite my fears and lack of confidence – that my future lay in television and that, once I really got the hang of it, the future could be rosy. I didn’t believe a word he was saying, but a part of me wanted him to be right. I actually thought a bit of fame might not go amiss.

Eventually Alan made me an offer. It was for a three-year contract with BBC Television at nearly twice my then salary of just short of £7,000. That was the part of the deal that encouraged me to move. I thought, I’ll have one more go. I can always go back to radio. I had to resign my comfortable staff job and now, apparently, I needed someone called an ‘agent’.

An agent. I had never needed one before. I had simply taken the salary offered me by the BBC and any increases they had felt like giving me in the eight or so years I had been a radio broadcaster. I had started on just over £2,000 a year at the end of 1969, and by 1977 I was earning the princely sum of close to £7,000 a year. I had been totally content with this compensation. I had a pleasant place to live, usually a nice sports car, and when I wanted to eat out or buy my friends a drink I could afford to do so. Money hadn’t really entered the equation. I could have still been in the insurance business. I was mostly thanking my lucky stars, David Waine and Angus McKay, for changing my life.

But now the BBC wanted to double my money – unimaginable riches. So I took the plunge and decided to have a real go at television. I went with the blessing of Bob Burrows, an old Angus hand, who had taken over as the boss of radio sport, with Cliff moving back to be Head of Outside Broadcasts at Television. He promised me that, if it didn’t work out, I could return to the fold, and anyway he wanted me to continue as the radio boxing commentator, which I did for many years, until the early Nineties.

But an agent. Why did I need an agent? Cliff explained that now I was a potential contractee, it would be necessary to renegotiate my deal from time to time and that it would be much better to have an intermediary involved. They need have no shame in making any demands and, at the same time, the BBC could be honest and direct about the broadcaster’s talents or deficiencies without being personal or hurtful.

I didn’t know any agents, so Cliff recommended the most powerful one around, a gentleman called Bagenal Harvey. Bagenal’s first client had been the outstanding English cricketer of his day, Denis Compton, who was also an Arsenal and England footballer. Denis had not only been cavalier with his wonderful skills but had been much the same with his business opportunities. Bagenal had found that Denis had a pile of unanswered letters, which contained various lucrative offers for product endorsements. Bagenal asked if he could deal with them and take a cut. That’s how Denis became the first ‘Brylcreem boy’ and how Bagenal Harvey started in the agency business. By now, though, he had numerous clients, many in broadcasting, including the two big hitters in television sports presentation at the time, David Coleman and Frank Bough. It occurred to me that I might be better off with an agent who was not representing the men in the jobs I aspired to, but I went to see Bagenal on Cliff’s recommendation.

The meeting did not go well. I thought Bagenal Harvey was interviewing me in the manner that he might adopt when hiring an office boy. ‘Mr Harvey,’ I interjected, I suppose rather cockily in retrospect. ‘I have not come here to be interviewed for a job. I have the job. I have come here to decide whether or not I want to hire you to work for me.’ The meeting came to a fairly swift end. Later, I got a call from Cliff. ‘What have you done to Bagenal Harvey? He’s not very 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 am still remembered by a few people in Wales for being the commentator when Swansea beat Preston North End at Deepdale to earn a place in the top division for the first time in their history. John Toshack was the manager. Nobby Stiles lost his job at Preston after that game.

By the time the European Championship finals came round in Italy in 1980, I was one of the commentators despatched to cover the event. Greece against Czechoslovakia stands out in my mind. I had seen neither team before the game. Some of the names were impossible, but I struggled my way through. On the way to the game, John Philips, my producer, who would eventually become the editor of Grandstand, had nearly killed us as he drove the wrong way up a motorway sliproad. He saw the oncoming traffic just in time. There was an advert at the time for an Italian car where one guy says ‘But the steering wheel is on the wrong side’. His mate replies, ‘The way he drives, it makes no difference.’ It became a much repeated slogan during our stay in Italy.

Back home, I continued to do the odd game for Match of the Day and was called on again in a commentary capacity for the World Cup Finals held in Spain in 1982. I was the sort of ‘Kim Philby’ of the team, the third man to Motson and Davies again.

A problem match for me there was Italy against Cameroon, who were then playing in their first ever finals. There was no television in Cameroon at the time, and so no chance of seeing a tape of their players. I was familiar with the goalkeeper and one outfield player, Roger Milla. The Italians, on the other hand, were nearly all big names. They were the easy part. But Cameroon had most of the play, held the Italians to a draw, and should have won. The Italian press destroyed the team and manager after the game, so much so that the Italian squad imposed a boycott on them. Italy of course went on to win the World Cup that year. Many red faces in the Italian press corps, but that was the end of my brief life as a football commentator.

Soon afterwards I was also approached by Aubrey Singer, who at the time was Managing Director of BBC Radio. Aubrey had a proposition for me. At the time, my television career was just about getting under way. I had done a few Grandstands and was beginning to get the hang of it, but I still went back to radio for boxing and tennis commentaries. It was while I was covering the Wimbledon Championships for radio that Aubrey grabbed me. ‘As you know,’ he said, ‘Bob Burrows has left us for ITV and I wonder if you would consider the possibility of becoming the boss of radio sport.’ I was shocked and flattered. If the invitation had come a year or two before, when I felt terribly insecure on television, I think I would have jumped at it. I knew the radio set-up pretty well and had loved my time there; I also knew what a great department Burrows and Cliff Morgan had built. The trouble was that I was now thinking that I might carve out a bit of a future for myself on TV.

Did I really want to be on the administrative side of broadcasting? I thought about it very carefully and decided that I would gamble on making it on the box, though for a while afterwards, when things weren’t going too well, I wondered if I had made the right decision. As it turned out, my good friend Patricia Ewing eventually took over the department and made a huge success of it. I know she thinks I made the right decision – not just for me, but for BBC Radio Sport.

I was destined for other things.