ITV Premier League has replaced the BBC's Match of the Day as the UK's flagship football highlights show Photo: ITV
As anyone will tell you Beefeater, the main thing with the crown jewels is not to lose them. Match of the Day is the BBC's favorite event most of the time. This year the program celebrates its 60th anniversary, but there were two long breaks on air. The first occurred between 1988 and 1992, and the second 23 years ago, after ITV lost the Premier League highlights.
His show Premiership is not remembered very well. You may remember the earlier opening, the theme song from U2's “Beautiful Day,” too many commercial breaks and Andy Townsend's new role, but at least half of those memories grew up in the retelling. The program aired for three years and was only shown in prime time for the first three months, after which Townsend's exile to Portakabin's external broadcast was also completed.
When she returned to the more traditional time of 10:30 p.m. The show has found its feet, and revisiting it now via YouTube, it's hard to understand what caused the hype back then. It's a solid, well-put together package of highlights, it just took some time to put together.
As we approach the 20th anniversary of its latest edition, we spoke to the key players in this chapter of sports broadcasting history. We start a year before ITV's highlight reel when Match of the Day presenter Des Lynam was poached from the BBC.
'I was paid quite a lot of money but I didn't do much'
Des Lynam, presenter: 'I felt like I was getting paid for old rope on ITV, really. I didn't really do much, but I got paid quite a lot of money. But it was their choice to move me away from the BBC and pay me that amount. I accepted it with joy and now I live off of it.”
Paul McNamara,Producer of the series Premier:“Des worked really hard. Apart from these small comments, we would have spent a lot of time developing them. He's one of those guys that the harder he worked, the easier it looked. But this laconic charm comes from a lot of bribery. These one-liners, these little images, come from hours of effort.”
Andy Townsend, pundit:“ITV tried to get a Match of the Day package. I don't think anyone really thought that would happen, but of course it did.”
Lynam: “I signed a five-year deal with ITV to broadcast live football and other events. things, Bafta, and the like. In fact, when they received the premiership, it was a big surprise for me. I wasn't thrilled by any means because I'd worked on Match of the Day for so long and I knew it was kind of a treasure for viewers.”
Lynam (centre) was a BBC stalwart before moving to ITV at the turn of the century. Photo: PA/John Stilwell
McNamara: “I was working for the BBC at the time. At Euro 2000 the news came that we had lost the contract. Gary [Lineker] did the show and we were all devastated. We didn't expect this and didn't know what it meant. It was truly a dark day for us. The feeling was: “Wow, we're the BBC and we've just lost Match of the Day.” You just couldn't understand it.”
Greg Dyke, then director general of the BBC:“We lost the highlights but won the FA Cup. I was always determined to try and win the FA Cup back.”
Brian Barwick, then ITV director of sport:“Greg Dyke was beaten for not winning it for the BBC, but was able to announce the return of the FA Cup on the BBC the next day. During this time we often ran into each other. We're friends now, but not then.”
Dike:“I see Brian Barwick, he's sitting four seats away from me in Brentford. To be fair, he was here for a while, but he wasn't there during the boardroom meetings where players' salaries were being manipulated.”
Barwick:“He lives not far from me, and I live not very far from him. The night the Premier League highlight rights were handed over, I was in the back seat of the car and he was in the back seat of the car. We stopped at a traffic light about a mile from where we live. He didn't see me, but I saw him, and he was screaming into the phone. At that moment I thought: “We won.” For all I knew, he could have been ordering Chinese takeout, but I just looked at him and thought, “This guy is stressed.”
Dyke:“I can’t remember any anger from Gary Lineker about losing the rights, I remember anger from Des Lynam when I accidentally said publicly that I didn’t think he was right for ITV, then I got a lot of crap. I said this informally in my speech, and of course someone reported it. I deliberately made the speech boring so that no one would report it. In the end we worked it out: when Brentford went to Brighton, we sat and had a drink together.”
Lynam:“I never said 'welcome back' after the advert or all that the clichés they use. If the host of the program I'm watching ever says, “Don't you dare leave,” I want to break the TV. I will dictate what to watch, not you.”
“Terry Venables was commissioned to develop ProZone, but he couldn't.”
The Premier League added bells and whistles and a new Prozone analytics tool to the classic Match of the Day formula, but its main innovation was a new early evening time slot. ITV had originally hoped for 6pm to kick off its traditional Saturday evening light entertainment programme, but it was moved to 7pm. This was still logistically ambitious and even more disruptive to planning.
Barwick:“David Liddiment [then director of programs at ITV] was a guy who always had ideas and always took risks. In his opinion, we could start Saturday night with something as vibrant as Premier League football.”
McNamara:“There was a lot of talk about how we could technically get the program on air at seven o'clock, given that the matches didn't finish until five o'clock. I knew Des wasn't really into it. He went to ITV and quit Match of the Day. But I think he was very happy to do it at seven o'clock because the evenings came back to him.”
Lynam: “I was all for it, but personally I was for This”. 'cause I'd be done and gone for the night, you know, pretty selfish.”
McNamara:“So the line came, 'Better for you, better for me.' , better for all of us.” I gave it to him and he burst out laughing and we did it at the first show. Every time I saw him over the years, he began with the words “It’s better for you…”
Linam:“We were disrupting viewers by forcing them to switch to a new channel with advertising, so I thought I was distracting them as little as possible, but that was not the majority opinion. There were people who wanted to make a lot of changes to the format, and I think they were wrong.”
Des Lynam was quite pleased earlier Premier League broadcast time
Clive Tildesley, commentator: “We are creatures of habit. And if the habit is good, why give it up? I think that our mistake back in 2001 has recently been repeated by other channels. There seems to be less love for, for example, Channel 4's coverage of England and TNT's European evenings. I'm not judging either, but the truth is that spectators care about football for the players on the field, not the pundits on the touchline. As long as you acquire rights, you acquire an audience. It's always nice to strive to attract new viewers, but not at the expense of serving your core audience. Perhaps this is where the Premier League got a little lost because I think our Champions League coverage was quality football television.”
Lynam:“Someone said, 'What we don't need to do is just Match of the Day with advertising,' and I said, 'That's exactly what we need to do.' Because you took away a valuable program from people who didn't. you want changes, but now you’re ruining everything because you’re also going to place advertisements. So what you don't need are other things, but this particular argument I lost. Dear Terry [Venables] was assigned to work on ProZone, but he couldn't do it. It needed a lot of words, and he didn’t have them.”
McNamara:“ProZone was ahead of its time, it is still used in clubs, but at that time it was not yet clear how to make it a television tool.”
Barwick: < /strong>“I had this idea, and it came about when we were aiming for six o'clock rather than seven, that if the players had not left the room by then, it would be nice for them to be able to observe and analyze the element of the game in which they participated. One way to do this is to put them in a van with a scanner and force them to explain what happened.”
Lynam :“The Tactical Truck was some nonsense that Andy Townsend encountered and he hasn't been able to stop thinking about it ever since.”
McNamara: “It was just bad reputation”. , the name alone almost killed him.”
Townsend:“The name definitely wasn't my damn idea.”
Barwick: strong>“It was quite possible that it was my name. I'm really excited to take the hit on Tactics Truck. It was of its time, perhaps ahead of its time, but it would have been better suited to a live program than something to be inserted into the show's highlights. Dear old Andy Townsend had to try and get someone out of the dressing room but he was stuck.”
< p> Townsend:“I remember Des saying to the producers and management: “Don’t put a label on it, don’t call it anything, it’s just part of the show – let’s go back to Old Trafford where Andy is with so-and-so.” -That”. they put a label on it, and very quickly it started to look a little stupid.”
McNamara:“The press were ready to have a little fun with the Premier League. Often, when something is new, the attitude is: let's work a little harder. If you try something new on television, people's first reaction will be: knock lightly until someone else says, “Oh, I really like that,” then other people say, “Oh, actually, I like it too.”
Townsend:“Ellie McCoist and I were one of the first people on the touchline trying to get a Champions League match at Old Trafford when it was bloody raining. This was met with many raised eyebrows at the time because everyone else was inside. Now on any Champions League night you walk into the stadium and there are 20 broadcasters on the touchline.”
These days, Broadcasting on the field became widespread. Photo: Paul Grover for Telegraph
Tyldesley:“Andy Townsend is one of the best cinematographers I have ever worked with. He's a good football analyst, it was just a pretty strange environment. Oddly enough for a program that was trying to be a little more attractive and entertaining, it wasn't very pleasing to the eye. It wasn't Monday Night Football. Andy was asked to analyze in 90 seconds what Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville would do in 10 minutes.”
Townsend:“The idea is not that outrageous, but it was poorly thought out and unfeasible. Try to force the players to leave the shelter of the locker room and then walk through the parking lot, where all the fans were, to the television complex. Some bought into it, but with some others it clearly felt like a struggle. But I was ready to try. I always laughed at this. If on television you're not prepared to try something and be a little upset about it, then you're in the wrong business.”
“Cilla Black wasn't happy about it, and neither was Paul O.” Grady'
Reaction to the first show was mixed, but not entirely hostile. Giles Smith's review for the Telegraph was headlined “Where Des is, there is hope” but he also wrote: “I thought the first program was a pig's ear that even Nigella couldn't turn into something edible… Highlights came and went. , in a hurry in a jump. Either the program didn't seem to know what the story was, or it was chasing too many stories at once.” Viewing figures were slightly below ITV's expectations and the press smelled blood.
Lynam:“Everyone in television is worried about bad reviews. You think you don't care and you say you don't, but deep down you don't care. In general, I was very lucky with the press, but I always remember the strange and bad moments.”
Dyck:“I thought the real problem was that they completely miscalculated who was controlling the TV at that time on a Saturday night. In those days, it wasn't the man of the family, and it was a time when people didn't have multiple televisions and everything else.”
McNamara:“The editorial got skewed because that we started putting the best games last so that we could switch the audience to the next program. It was a little strange asking the viewer to wait. Your editorial instinct is to play the big game.”
Tyldesley:“The idea of seeing the highlights of the day's games before the last hot dog truck leaves the stadium grounds was bold and almost visionary. But we are all more comfortable with changes when they are gradual and organic. To do it in that time frame was revolutionary in itself, without having to tow a tactical truck behind it.”
Barwick:“The first five Saturdays of that year there was weather like we’ve never had before or since. I used to come home at about half past five, and I could hear the barbecue being cooked left and right. I used to think, “These are our viewers.”
Terry Venables (left) was in charge of Prozone usage when Ally McCoist started his television career. Photo: ITV
Lynam:“It was still British Summer Time, the clocks had not yet gone back. People didn't really watch football at that time, they were probably on the beach. It had a decent audience, but the powers that be were very much against what it was before because we replaced Cilla Black (the Blind Date presenter) and pushed her back a bit. She wasn't happy about it, and neither was Paul O'Grady. They didn't want it at the time. I got a note from the head of ITV saying: “Whatever they say about it, just control yourself. It's not me who lost my temper, it's them because they moved the time to 10.30.”
Barwick:“We were told it would return to a more established time slot. It wasn't the best moment. But you're dealing with commercial television, it's a practical business that has to make money.”
Linam:“I wrote a note to the head of ITV saying: 'Whose nerves are broken?' We all had a really good moan and then forgot about it. It's not like extracting coal from a mine, is it? During the day we watched football, we bet on it like crazy among ourselves, and then we showed the show live. On the first show in the new slot I said: “Thank you for joining us in our new and improved time.”
“On the BBC you went off the air and went home, on ITV you had a party.”< p>The Premier League continued until the 2004–05 season, after which the highlights reverted to BBC One and Match of the Day, which paid £105 million for a three-year contract – significantly less than the £189 million ITV paid over three years. . In the first program, Gary Lineker began by saying: “So where were we before we were so rudely interrupted?” What do those involved in ITV's attempt to reinvent Premier League highlights almost a quarter of a century later think?
Lynam:“They've gradually toned down Tactics Truck and Prozone and that's essentially , became Match of the Day.
Barwick:“We had a year to create the first program, and it was too long. We had so many ideas that we almost forgot about football, but that was fixed within two to three weeks. We were criticized for our lack of action, and on reflection, this was fair criticism. But it was a problem of overenthusiasm. Everyone had an idea and we tried to squeeze everyone in.”
Tildsley:“It replaced Match of the Day and Blind Date, two places. There is no doubt that all institutions will need to be replaced over time. We've all watched great players bat beyond the stated time, but it takes time for a new batsman to get into the game, and the Premier League hasn't gotten much. It could have been more if it hadn't come to the wicket looking like a Twenty20 batter.”
Clive Tildesley worked a lot years at ITV. Photo: PA/Mike Egerton
McNamara:“It was a good product and we were very proud of it. I spent about eight months of my life thinking about this. For it to not last more than two months [at 19:00], it was really terrible. Everyone worked really hard, we all gave it our all, and for reasons beyond our control, sales, strategy, audience and everything above my pay grade, everything was changed.”
Townsend :“The people who worked at ITV at the time, the producers, were very good and respected in the industry. They always strived to come up with something new. Probably, looking back, we can say that we had to try pretty hard. Plus, when you work for the BBC, it was difficult. They are the establishment. Now it won't be so difficult because people attack them very quickly.”
Tildesley:The commentators were Guy [Mowbray], who is currently number one on the BBC. Peter [Drury] is number 1 at Sky. Champs [John Champion] is the lead cinematographer. I had my moments. So we had enough people who knew one end of the microphone from the other. Any trust deficit was due to the added bells and whistles.”
Lynam: “I had a wonderful career at the BBC and was constantly getting pats on the back. When I came to ITV I was criticized a bit. Everything I did at the BBC improved my reputation, but at ITV it fell. But on ITV they were very much for you. On the BBC you went off the air and went home, on ITV you finished the program and had a party.”
McNamara: “Whenever I hear the intro to A Beautiful Day, I went back to that time. Wherever I am, I'm thinking, “Oh God, that's it, 4-3-2-1, signal Des, Terry, get the Prozone ready, it's not ready yet!” It was a bit. I can tell you that at seven o’clock the gallery is busy.”
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