by Roger Mosey
Fortunately, the sport Creative Future team battered down Grandstand’s remaining defences. The group’s members included Dave Gordon, as one of the most respected former editors of Grandstand, and Clare Balding as a current presenter. They were supplemented by emerging stars in the division such as Jonathan Wall, who went on to become controller of 5 Live. The evidence we looked at was overwhelming: what we needed to do was invest in the digital future, principally our website and streaming services, and to phase out the formats that had dwindling audiences – and were, at worst, a drag on the image of BBC Sport. If we could let our major events stand in their own right, as the BBC’s Olympics or the BBC’s Wimbledon coverage, then they would achieve greater impact. We also spotted that the BBC could create ‘surround-sound’ programming that made sport even more appealing to audiences and, importantly, wooed rights holders too. Top of our recommendations was ‘harness the whole BBC – local and national – to make the most of events like the World Cup and Olympics’, and we showed what we meant with a Top Gear special from the Winter Olympics in which the lads drove a Mini off a ski-jump. Impact, indeed.
There was no secret about the way our discussions were going, and that Grandstand was destined for the knacker’s yard with the unanimous backing of the Creative Future team and even the approval of the executive responsible for the show, Philip Bernie. Its demise also had the enthusiastic support of the BBC One channel team. Here, there is another of the glorious paradoxes of the BBC. At times, even the most secret discussions can leak out into the outside world, whereas some stories remain within the corporation even though almost everyone knows about them. The latter was the case with Grandstand.
In early 2006 I took part in a seminar pulling together all the Creative Future conclusions, and we told a couple of hundred of the BBC’s senior leaders that we were going to phase out Grandstand. The Sport leadership group knew too, as did significant numbers of the programme staff. But not a peep appeared anywhere until the night before Mark Thompson’s announcement of the corporation-wide plans for news, sport, drama, entertainment and the rest. It did, however, play big: ‘Grandstand Axed’ was the front-page splash in the Daily Mirror, and it was in all the other papers too. As usual, it was the BBC who managed to report most negatively on their own story by implying that it was all over for sport at the corporation, and contriving to miss out our reassurance that sports coverage would continue on most Saturday afternoons and we would be expanding our output elsewhere. We were grateful to people like Des Lynam, who got it spot on: ‘I’m sad about it in many ways because the programme stood the test of time for so long,’ he said, when the announcement was made. ‘But with multi-channel television, people will only really watch live events when they are big-time. The days of viewers sticking with the programme for five hours just because it was on are gone.’
After the years of fretting about Grandstand, it felt good for the BBC to have made the decision. The only problem was that sport is a division where producers regard ‘decisions’ as being the opening of a debate rather than its conclusion, and where there is a profound scepticism about management. One of my moles reported a road trip in which a senior editor spent most of a dinner with junior producers attacking the management as people who simply did not support sport. This was a serious obstacle to productive staff relations. ‘Just wait for this lot to move on, and we’ll be fine’ was the gist of the Grandstand supporters’ argument, and there was an immediate drive to make our ‘phasing out’ of the programme one of the longest transitions in broadcasting history. For some weeks, the discussion meandered around final shows being in 2008, to enable it to reach its 50th anniversary, or even later. One of the team suggested that, given we had London 2012 only six years away, it would be mad to lose the brand before then, given the alleged resonance of Olympic Grandstand. It became a hallmark of meetings about the theme music for any event, big or small, that someone would suggest using the Grandstand music ‘because it’s so popular’ – which was true about the music, but the motive seemed to be more about keeping the programme on life support.
I did, however, relish a little spat with Steve Rider, a former BBC presenter who had moved over to ITV, from which vantage point he called on us to save Grandstand. I wrote to Broadcast magazine:
If ITV’s Steve Rider is so worried about the future of Grandstand then the solution is in his hands. ITV should bring back World of Sport. I gather that Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks are sadly no longer with us, but Steve is just the man to link smoothly between a revived ITV Seven and wrestling from Derby.
One night late in 2006, after a particularly exasperating day with some of the producers, I was sitting on the platform at Turnham Green station, waiting for a delayed Tube train home, when the idea seized me that we should go for a quick ‘kill’. The Six Nations would start in February 2007, and just before then was, surely, the right time to take Grandstand off the air. We were guaranteed weeks of top action on a Saturday, which would benefit from having a focus on a single sport, and the branding could be the BBC’s Six Nations rather than a mishmash involving Grandstand. I put the thought to my management team the next day, and they went for it. Again, a decision was better than letting things fester.
We told the team immediately, and I mused publicly in an interview with The Guardian in December that the programme would be phased out ‘early next year’, but we did not make a public announcement about the date of its final edition. This was a mistake. The reason was simply that we wanted to avoid yet another bunch of newspaper articles about ‘the end of BBC Sport as we know it’, but we got some of that anyway. The Daily Mail were tipped off about the last-ever show and weighed in with a piece headlined ‘The shamefaced BBC don’t want you to notice this, but after forty-eight years they are pulling the plug on a national institution’. Determinedly unshamefaced, I whacked them back with a blog calling their piece ‘endearingly bizarre’, since we had announced the closure the previous spring with a great fanfare. But they were right that we did not give it the send-off it deserved. The final Sunday afternoon programme centred dispiritingly on indoor bowls, and we laid on some wine and snacks for the team. On that gloomy January day, I felt like a murderer appearing before a panel of victims’ relatives, but I have never regretted the decision. It was right, and BBC Sport has been stronger without Grandstand. The investment in digital services paid off, and the coverage of the 2012 Olympics was inspired by the belief that there was a world beyond the linear programmes of the analogue era.
The sleepless nights in BBC Sport were, instead, caused by rights issues. From the start, I knew that my key ally would be Dominic Coles, the director of sports rights and my financial right-hand man. It was to Dominic that we owed the deals for the Olympics, including 2012, and the World Cups up to 2014 – which were a reassuring anchor for a new director. He is a formidable rights negotiator and a clever strategist, and we developed a friendship reminiscent of my relationship with Jim Naughtie. We were both in always-on mode, usually about work but also sharing the ups and downs of our respective football teams. He supports Liverpool and I was at that stage on the waiting list for my Arsenal season ticket. Our contact became even more intense when we were in the middle of a negotiation, and we had the heart-pounding combination of excitement imbued by fear that a deal would go the wrong way. Life in BBC Sport was made more perilous by the newspapers’ fixations. Even when Peter Salmon had successfully started to rebuild the portfolio, the single loss of the Boat Race to ITV had provoked newspaper correspondents to further fits of gloom on our behalf. An article at the time noted that the loss of such a symbolic event ‘prompted a flood of unfavourable headlines, accompanied by predictable hand-wringing over the BBC’s commitment to sport and at least one call for [Salmon’s] resignation’.
I, of course, had had some experience of this on 5 Live – when Dominic had been one of the corporate minders ensuring that our bidding was within appropriate financial guidelines. But radio was easy compared
with television, and in my first couple of years leading the whole of BBC Sport we knew we faced battles for the renewal of Match of the Day, our FA Cup and England deal, the Six Nations, Wimbledon and a range of other events. This was against a background of a vigorous and massively funded Sky Television, competition in the pay market from Setanta, and an ITV hungry for sport. We had even more of a problem when Michael Grade, who loved sport, defected as BBC chairman to become ITV’s chief executive. But our first scare came from an unexpected source. In the early summer of 2006 we were bidding for the terrestrial television package of Premier League highlights – the content of the weekly Match of the Day and MOTD2 – in what had initially seemed like an easy process for us. ITV had been so bruised by the experience of The Premiership when they had taken the rights from us in 2000 that we were sure they would not be in the market again. We doubted Channel 4 had the money or ambition to come in for the Premier League, and Channel 5’s interest had been rumoured in the past but had never come to anything. We were wrong.
The Premier League process was being handled by its chief executive, Richard Scudamore, and by my colleague from Today in the 1980s David Kogan, though it is a given in this kind of situation that friendships do not count. David and I understand where friendship ends and business begins. There is, in any case, a rigorous process involving lawyers and scrutineers, which means that the call about whether your bid has won or lost is made from a Premier League control room with the maximum amount of formality. Even so, we expected that after our opening bid the phone would ring with good news: it would be Richard, with David alongside, confirming that Match of the Day would be back with us for another three years. Instead, it was a setback. The Premier League was going to take the bidding process to a second round, which meant there must be another serious contender.
Dominic would sometimes give me a lift home, since we lived in the same part of south-west London. That evening we debated all the way through the traffic of Hammersmith and Chiswick, and had to stop for more conversation over a beer in Kew. Who could the other bidder be? And, crucially, how much would we need to bid to make sure that we won the second round? Match of the Day was not just a powerful way of attracting football fans who might otherwise not come to the BBC; it was also the core of the BBC One weekend schedule, underpinning Football Focus and Final Score as well as having a repeat broadcast of the main show on a Sunday morning. The period without it had revealed how big a hole it could leave. We had gone to the BBC finance committee and to the director-general, Mark Thompson, to get approval for a properly costed bid, but we would need to go back again and run through the numbers about how much the highlights were worth to us – and how highly a competitor might value them. To this day, we have never known officially who our rival was, but we are pretty sure it was Channel 5, for whom this would have been, in every sense, a game changer. They would have had a lot of brilliant content that would be guaranteed to attract an audience. Whoever it was, they must have run us very close in the first round – and the rocketing of the price paid in the second round tells its own story. The published figures show that the BBC had paid £105 million for a three-year deal in 2003; and in 2006 we paid £171.6 million for a similar package. Good news for the Premier League coffers, but bad news for our war chest given the other fights that were looming.
The roughest ride we had was about our support, or not, for cricket. After our loss of the rights in the 1990s, Channel 4 had done a sterling job of showcasing cricket on terrestrial television. The Ashes series of 2005 was one of the most glorious and highest-rating ever. But the most recent rights deal had whisked away the whole of the sport to pay television, after a knockout bid from Sky. There were four strong reasons for us to be pessimistic about a return of cricket to the BBC’s screens. The first was that once a sport has gone to pay television, it seldom comes back to free to air. It was way beyond our resources to imagine that we could recapture the biggest cricket events. The second, related, was that nothing in cricket was a category A-listed event – one that was guaranteed to be available live and free to air. The argument immediately started that it should become so again, but the economics were against this. If the England and Wales Cricket Board got their lucrative deal with Sky because of the inclusion of the Ashes in the overall package, the value would collapse if the Ashes were then removed and handed over to the terrestrial broadcasters. Sky needed the premium Test matches to guarantee their investment and to balance the duty commitment to a dull day of Glamorgan v. Essex. Third, the BBC had filled its sporting diary with other events after the removal of cricket from its portfolio. It needed agreement with the ECB about how the year was planned to avoid clashes with Wimbledon, Ascot, athletics and the rest. In Peter Salmon’s time, the BBC had had a dozen or more meetings on this theme but had got nowhere, and terrestrial television airtime was still limited if we wanted to do justice to a major match. Fourth, and less important, was that BBC television schedulers were never overenthusiastic about the return of cricket. For them, it went on too long with generally low ratings, and it was subject to rain interruptions or extended sessions of play that made scheduling even more of a headache.
We did, thankfully, have the wondrous Test Match Special on radio, and we made an early gesture of our commitment to the sport on television by acquiring the highlights packages for the Cricket World Cup and for the Ashes series in Australia. There are few things I personally enjoy more than a day at Lord’s with agreeable refreshments, so there was no animosity in the management team towards cricket. But we had an awkward public position in that, under the previous director, we had not bid even for the highlights package of the most recent domestic contract, and, under new management, we didn’t believe there was a real chance of the sport coming back live onto our airwaves. The ‘Keep Cricket Free’ campaign wanted us to agree a deal with BSkyB that would essentially hand over their best bits to us at a commercial price, which we always thought was an improbable outcome and likely to be way too expensive. However, the battle to maintain listed events is one that is in the public interest – and we didn’t want to seem indifferent to the many people in our audience who were now shut out from watching any cricket unless they had a Sky subscription.
All the heads of sport for the main broadcasters were summoned by the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee in the November of 2005 to be grilled about why cricket had migrated to pay television, and how it was that the ECB appeared to have broken an agreement with the government that this would not happen. The BBC was in the firing line for not having shown enough enthusiasm for the sport. I found this an unappealing episode, especially with the parliamentary sketch-writers perched on the press benches and hoping for blood. John Whittingdale, the committee chairman, promptly bowled me a yorker by asking me why we had not bid for highlights, and I gave the honest answer that it was because we thought Channel 4 would retain them. Whittingdale replied, to laughter: ‘So you did not bid because you thought somebody, who also was not bidding, was actually going to win?’ Well, yes, kind of. It is particularly difficult doing one of these committees when you were not in post when the decisions were made, because you have a choice of sounding weaselly (‘I wasn’t there at the time’) or defending in a corporate way but being at risk on the detail of something you were not involved in. But the committee came to the accurate conclusion that the primary responsibility for the live sport going behind a pay barrier was that the government and ECB had let it be so. We were criticised for not having offered an attractive enough alternative option, but in response to the Commons report we said that we hoped to bid for cricket again in future, subject to two things: one, that the scheduling around other events was resolved; and two, that it offered value for money. Those qualifications were crucial, as we saw later in my tenure at BBC Sport.
Horseracing was a similarly awkward sport for us. We had a simple view. We really liked the Grand National and Royal Ascot and the Derby, and all the landmark events of the racing year. We wo
uld have wanted to win back the Cheltenham Festival, which had transferred to Channel 4, and where I had enjoyed days of racing and people-watching as controller of 5 Live. It was a compellingly successful mix of the Queen Mother with thousands of Irish visitors and lakes of Guinness. However, we weren’t bothered about the lesser days – what I would sometimes call ‘the 2.50 at Wincanton’ – because our audiences weren’t either. This made relations with the racing authorities somewhat tricky. They, quite reasonably, wanted more coverage that they believed would bolster the sport and encourage higher attendances and more sponsorship. We thought that the best advertisement for horseracing was coverage of its biggest events in the heart of the BBC One schedule, with the rest of the sport on Channel 4 or the dedicated racing channels. We managed a renewal on that basis while I was director of sport, but it was no surprise when, a few years later, this dissolved and BBC television was left without any racing at all. We were proved right, though, that audiences for many of the landmarks would fall if they moved away from us. I read a piece by Greg Wood in The Guardian in 2014 reporting the fall in racing’s viewers post-BBC in which he spoke of the ‘fantastic exposure’ the BBC used to give: ‘The BBC was often criticised in the past for showing no interest in racing beyond the “crown jewels”: the Derby, Grand National and Royal Ascot. What is now starting to become apparent is the sport’s extraordinary arrogance … in the long term, the benefit to racing was immense.’ Quite.