I must have got some things right during those ten years at BH but I certainly got a few things wrong too. On my first frenetic Saturday I was given charge of compiling highlights from the third and fourth division football. This involved ripping off sheets of paper from the teleprinters and sorting out who had scored for which team where. Come the moment critique I got hold of the lip microphone the wrong way round (I had used only open mikes for my Sports Session reports) and my immortal words were lost until Bob Burrows seized the mike and turned it round the other way.
As I learned the ropes I would sometimes be charged with giving running news from the teleprinters as the final whistles sounded at football matches round the country at 4.40 pm, which meant having a good working knowledge of all the clubs and players. In those days I was interested and I did. I certainly do not now: overkill has dulled my interest. Even then I was accused of overdoing the mentions of Jim Cumbes, Ted Hemsley and Phil Neale, who all combined league football with county cricket.
Saturday was the focal point of the sporting week for the Sports News department of the BBC, whose ranks I joined on the first day of March 1970. It was also the first day for Desmond Lynam, who became famous.
Desmond was marked for stardom from the moment he arrived, having made a small name for himself already at Radio Brighton. Angus Mackay, founder of Sports Report, had already spotted his potential as a successor to two more obviously Irish presenters, Eamonn Andrews and Liam Nolan. Peter Jones, another natural broadcaster, a romantic about sport and life who was blessed with immense self-confidence and, Welsh though he was, more blarney than most Irishmen, did the same job equally well. Curly-haired, blue-eyed and attractive to the girls, he had left his former job as a teacher at Bradfield after an affair with one of the matrons. An ebullient, personable extrovert, he continued to burn the candle at both ends, which no doubt contributed to a sadly early end to his life when he suffered a fatal stroke midway through his commentary on the Boat Race.
One Saturday afternoon in the Sports Room I passed on some information to Peter about who had scored against whom in the afternoon matches in the first division. It was his job that day to summarise the main matches and events. ‘Aren’t you going to write them down’, I asked him. ‘No’, he said, tapping his head: ‘They’re in here.’
Even had they not been, he would have bluffed his way through once he was on the air. Unlike Desmond, who could be nervous, Peter had supreme confidence. He developed a style of delivering news, not entirely naturally, that other reporters used to follow, ending the last word in each sentence on a slightly upward inflexion. I found it irritating and much preferred Desmond’s more intimate delivery methods, seldom followed, alas, by today’s bombastic presenters.
Peter was, however, a gifted performer with a touch of the poetic in his descriptions. He enjoyed football commentary more than anything so he was seldom in the studio. Desmond, smoothly at home in front of a microphone before he ever faced a television camera, took every challenge in his unhurried stride, blessed as he was with a good voice, a quick wit and a sense of humour. Working with Mackay, he needed it.
The boss of the Sports Room was a formidable, bespectacled, red-faced, chain-smoking, whisky-loving Scotsman with a biting tongue. He was seen in the BBC as an innovator because of the success of Sports Report in summarising the main events of the afternoon in his quick-moving programme every Saturday between five and six o’clock. By the time that I joined his staff, having been told to apply for a job after doing some free-lance broadcasts – and duly being chosen by the BBC ‘board’ that interviewed candidates for every job – the redoubtable Angus ruled his Sports News department with a rod of iron and, to my mind, absurd inflexibility. At home he was apparently a mild family man, but he could be ruthless at work. Amongst his regular pundits was the well known and opinionated J.L. Manning of the Daily Mail, who, towards the end of his life, suffered from the ill health that affects too many workaholic journalists. One early Saturday afternoon his wife rang Angus to say that he would not be appearing on Sports Report that evening because he had just been taken to hospital after a heart attack. Soothing remarks were heard from Angus’s end of the line: ‘That’s terrible news. Don’t you worry a bit. You give Jim our very best wishes . . .’ Immediately he had put the phone down he yelled to his assistant, Bob Burrows: ‘Bob, come into my office now. Bloody Manning’s let us down again.’
I eventually rebelled against the bullying nature of his leadership, which did me no good, but I survived my first test of character in his presence. ‘We’re calling you Chris Jenkins, is that all right?’ he demanded with an icy stare on my first Saturday morning in studio B9 at Broadcasting House as he pored over the script for that morning’s Sports Parade. ‘I’d prefer my full name if you don’t mind, Sir’, I replied. He cursed, took a drag on his cigarette, rubbed out the shorter name and inserted the additional letters that would take up a few more split-seconds in his tightly-timed schedule.
Angus had passed his peak by the time that I joined the staff. What had once been an innovative collection of sports programmes, including regular bulletins throughout the day during the week, had become, perhaps, a little staid. He taught me two things at least which I have never forgotten, however: it is less coal, but fewer sacks; and you should say Notts County but never Notts Forest – always Nottingham Forest.
The latter might not be considered a matter of crucial international importance, unless you are from Nottingham, but I like to think that in those mainly scripted programmes there were far fewer solecisms than one hears on the air every day now. Sports broadcasters in these laissez-faire days of Five Live are natural and confident but I wish most of them had had a few more lessons in English grammar. Presenters are forever ‘sat’ here’ or ‘stood’ there.
It would not have been tolerated by Angus Mackay, who could call upon virtually anyone he chose to appear on his programmes. Amongst my early reporting colleagues were W. Barrington Dalby, who used to do inter-round summaries when Eamonn Andrews commentated on big fights in boxing; the gregarious Geoffrey Green, football correspondent of The Times, who had a twinkle in his eye and a wonderfully bibulous voice, and Harold Abrahams, the sprinting hero of the Olympics no less, now an athletics expert who would sometimes also turn his hand to humble football reporting. All of them fastidiously spoke the Queen’s English.
The reputation of Sports Report, and the large circle of contacts built up by Angus by the early seventies, certainly attracted some of the biggest names. Fred Perry, three times Wimbledon champion, made regular appearances when the Grand Slam tournaments were nigh, always looking sun-tanned whatever the time of year. His moustache was perfectly trimmed and his accent transatlantic. His wife, by then his fourth – and, obviously the right one because they looked devoted and the marriage lasted forty years – would accompany him, looking very expensive in a white fur coat if the weather was cold. The young Tony Jacklin also used to come in with his wife, the beautiful green-eyed, Vivien, who died young, a tragedy that no doubt curtailed his brief reign as the world’s best golfer.
The most regular visitors, however, were Henry Cooper and his fat, cigar-smoking manager, Jim Wicks. I got quite good at imitating ‘Our Enery’s modest cockney voice, complete with occasional spoonerisms, and the quiet London-Jewish drawl of Wicks. Indeed they were amongst the well-known characters whom I used to take off to entertain colleagues in spoof broadcasts at the end of the year, long forgotten about now. I mixed them with the broad northern tones of ‘Mr. Rugby League’ Eddie Waring – ‘Sullivan ’as the ball, woofs it upfield to Murphy. Neil Fox is underneath it – ’ello there’s a bit of hokey-pokey going on’ – and the sharply contrasting showjumping commentator Dorian Williams: ‘One more double-barred gate and it’ll be a clear round for Anneli Drummond-Hay. Come on Anneli . . . Oh, my word, she came a cropper there . . . She literally took orff . . . we can see it again, I think . . . Poor Anneli, she literally took orff.’
Light-
hearted days, some of them! I used this limited ability as an impressionist whenever Robin Marlar, another of Sports Report’s favourite polemicists, was performing. I would read his various quotations from the week’s news in the appropriate accent (or try to do so: I never quite mastered Scouse). Robin, always entertaining and often impetuous, once used a longish paragraph on some sporting issue of the moment from a letter to The Times by Air Vice Marshal Sir Dermot Boyle. When I had read it Robin added with feeling: ‘Wise words. Well said Mr. Boyle of Maidenhead.’
Angus had three main assistants: Bob Burrows, Vincent Duggleby and Godfrey Dixey. Vincent was bright, genial but occasionally volatile; an outstanding broadcaster in his own right who can still be heard introducing the money programmes on radio that became his forte. Burrows was well named. He busied himself like a ferret at his duties, always careful to keep his boss on his side and leaving no stone unturned to get the programmes as sharp and accurate as possible. Often I would be longing to get home on a Saturday evening only for Bob, with characteristic blinks of his eyes, to suggest a phone-call to someone to set up a new angle on some story for the following Monday.
His eventual reward was a well-paid job in charge of ITV sport but I had foolishly crossed swords with Bob on a man-management issue when, goaded into action by a disgruntled colleague, I passed on some general discontent with his leadership to the boss of BBC Radio, Aubrey Singer, whom I had recently met. Quite rightly Singer supported his manager. I should have tackled Bob directly but that approach had not worked when, some years before, I had walked through what Angus claimed to be an ‘always open door’ in order to make a criticism about something to do with one of our programmes.
I had badly misjudged the moment andconstructive suggestions, he ordered Desmond not to buy me a beer in his presence during the ‘quick drink after the show’ that was expected to be attended each Saturday night by all concerned. To his great credit Desmond replied that he had ordered a pint for me and another for himself and that we were jolly well going to drink them.
Godfrey Dixey could not have been more different from all these forceful characters. He was intelligent, nervous and a loyal, slightly frightened assistant producer, very competent but terrified of getting things wrong. He was a bachelor, good company off duty, a dapper, round-faced little fellow who wore gold-rimmed spectacles on the end of his nose that made him look like a Victorian clerk. He liked his pint and a good chat about cricket. His main responsibilities on a Saturday were a regional sports programme called Sports Session and the digested version of Sports Report that went out on the BBC’s World Service later in the evening. I would sometimes present both these programmes and on one occasion took a leading part in a somewhat catastrophic broadcast that almost caused Godfrey to self-combust.
First he (and I) discovered, on the air, that my friend Jeremy Allerton, to whom he had entrusted a report on the afternoon’s rugby matches, was a stutterer. A charming fellow who has been extremely unlucky in life, his consolation came from being very attractive to women. His former house now belongs to David Gower. It was only under the intense pressure of broadcasting live that Jeremy’s stutter returned to haunt him, much as it must have done the future King George VI in the 1930s. It was, of course, excruciating for him and deeply embarrassing for me. I had no option other than to put an end to his agony and move on to the next item. Then, however, I contributed further to Godfrey’s visible chagrin. All these programmes, whatever their overall length, had to be timed to the second, to ensure that the next one would itself start bang on time. Every contributor carried a stopwatch – BBC issue to staff – and Angus drummed it into each of us that a minute report meant 60 seconds, not 59 or 61, although any over-run was the cardinal sin. Producers had to be good at maths, forever calculating how long they had in hand to the end and if something unexpected happened, such as Jeremy’s misfortune, adjustments had to be made on the hoof. Godfrey, like Angus, always used the racing results as a buffer at the end of the programme. It meant that the reader, in this case myself as presenter, could read them slowly or quickly to order.
For some reason on the evening in question I had misread the clock and was starting my closing words – a quick trail of the following week’s sport – with about ten seconds to go to what I thought was the optimum second to say goodbye or good night. Suddenly I was aware of a desperate Godfrey beside me. He could have used the talkback to warn me through my earphones but in his panic did not. Instead, unable to speak because of the open microphone, he was alternately pointing at his stopwatch, which showed just over a minute to the hour, and waving his arm from his shoulder to his backside in a very good imitation of Lester Piggott riding a close finish at Epsom. Just in time I got the message that I had failed to read the last set of results. ‘So that’s next week’, I blarneyed, ‘but for those of you waiting for the results from Towcester, here they are.’ I sped through the first three placed horses and their starting prices in the six races with as much dignity as possible and got off the air in the nick of time.
I was amused in the bar afterwards by a story from John Webster, an amiable newsreader who for many years read both the football and racing results for Sports Report. He had, he said, put on his best Italian accent to read the winner of the 4.20 at Uttoxeter, ‘Thinice’. An apologetic typist told him afterwards that he had failed to put a gap between ‘Thin’ and ‘Ice’.
The typist in question was no doubt an eccentric fellow called Bill Ross, a fierce and often angry bearded man with brown horn-rimmed glasses, who dressed a bit like a tramp and occupied a large desk nearest to the teleprinters. He had the quickest of brains, always zipping through the Times crossword in under half an hour during his lunch hour. He hated fools and foolishness and since he was always confronted by one or the other he was usually in a lather about something. He was, however, extremely good at his job, which was to collate results at speed. He also kept large exercise books inside blue hard-backed covers – everyone knew them as Bill Ross’s blue books – which recorded every detail of each football season under club headings. Any member of the Sports Room was allowed to consult the blue books for such details as who had scored the fourth goal for Huddersfield Town against Plymouth Argyle on 23 September. Ask any stupid question of Bill, however, and your head was almost literally bitten off, especially as it was obvious to him that a University education had been utterly wasted on you.
Another singular character was an Oxford graduate of high intelligence with a Walter Mitty streak, named Roger Macdonald. He had a high-pitched voice and made himself an expert on European football. He claimed to know everyone and said to me once as I left for a reception: ‘If Sean Connery’s there, give him my regards.’ Roger sped up the inside of the BBC as a producer, but his imagination eventually got the better of him and he was dismissed.
I did most things during my time based in the Sports Room, including reading the football results occasionally after the manner prescribed by Webster, which allowed the listener to tell from the inflexion of the voice as the first team was named whether it was going to be a home win, a draw or a home defeat. A bright, positive pronunciation of ‘Tottenham Hotspur 1’ told the knowing listener at once that it would be followed by ‘Chelsea nil’. A downbeat ‘Tottenham Hotspur 1’ would mean that Chelsea had won. An even voice, the verbal equivalent of a perfectly balanced see-saw, denoted a draw. I rather enjoyed the challenge but it was not exactly the limit of my ambitions. James Alexander Gordon, nevertheless, became quite famous in later years as radio’s football results man with the mild Scots accent.
I suppose that I had made a reasonable reputation as a broadcaster before crossing swords with Angus but I dare say that he could have finished me had he wanted to pursue the vendetta. The BBC had a system of annual reports on every member of staff, written by the head of department, who would read the assessment to him and invite any reaction before it was passed higher up the hierarchy. ‘Christopher is a hard-working and talented broadcaster but v
ery naïve’ was the gist of my report that year. On the last score Angus was no doubt spot on.
I had probably incurred his wrath for more than this one failure to realise that ‘if you ever want to talk to me about anything, whatever it is, don’t hesitate’ actually meant ‘don’t you dare criticise my way of doing things, however old-fashioned you may think it is’. I had also become, quite early in my career at Portland Place, a small pawn in an internal battle between Mackay’s Sports News department and the longer established Outside Broadcasts department which had responsibility for all the live commentaries.
Eventually the two empires were amalgamated under the benign, wise and unselfish leadership of Robert Hudson, later succeeded by the brilliant and mercurial Cliff Morgan, supreme fly-half turned passionate broadcaster. Such internal politics were never far below the surface at the BBC, however, and eventually they drove me off the staff in frustration after ten mainly happy years.
Fortunately, I have never stopped working as a freelance broadcaster for the BBC, nor have I broadcast for any rival organisation, despite one characteristically blunt telephoned offer from Kelvin Mackenzie when his talkSPORT was starting to win some of the radio cricket commentary contracts. ‘Come on’ he said: ‘You take your bat where the bowling is, don’t you?’ Fortunately the bowling did not stay at his end for long. I would probably have been better off now had I stayed on the staff and held on for a BBC pension because the final salary scheme was still going strong when I reached the age of sixty, but for all sorts of other reasons I was pleased to be free when I went back to The Cricketer early in 1981. Above all, as I have said, it gave me much more time at home with Judy and our three children.
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