sport

Balls

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Dear Diary, I am 57 years old and I have just watched a football match for the first time. “Dear William,” replies Diary, “you were eating chocolate cake at a Royal Television Society awards dinner while they played some match on screens that you didn’t look at. It doesn’t count.”

So it remains that my only experience of football is the first bit of a game at some ground where a team played another team and as I walked in, the entire crowd sensed my expertise and turned to me like a wall. As soon as I was done with whatever radio work I was doing, I turned away from them and escaped.

I do wonder if I’m missing out by having this total absence of sport. During that RTS dinner, a waitress standing behind me yelped – actually yelped – with excitement at whatever was happening on the screen. I asked her what I’d missed, she explained and I understood, I just didn’t feel it. I was excited meeting Ellie Simmonds at the dinner, but while I wouldn’t say this to her, I was thinking yeah, yeah, sport, amazing, now what about Strictly Come Dancing?

It’s possible I did say that.

It was not the longest conversation I’ve ever had, but it was work. My wife Angela Gallagher and I were tasked with briefing each of the presenters at the awards, which took six to ten seconds per person, then fetching them from their tables when they were needed to get ready. It was probably a total of twenty minutes spread out over the evening, but it was work and so it was bliss. A really gorgeous dinner, a really great crowd, and instead of sitting there at a table all evening, I got to run around the whole place in a tuxedo. Since I believe fervently that it is better to be crew than passenger, it was wonderful.

And I got to see Angela at work. I can’t explain this, but given a task, Angela switched from dinner guest to a kind of producer-mode. It was like a light switch had been thrown and seeing her in action, even on the same task I was doing right there with her, even in this smallest part we were of the event, it was fantastic.

It also wasn’t sport and when you and I started today, I’d intended to tell you a sports story in which I sound like an idiot. Let me see if I can turn that around at all.

Follow. It’s some time in the 1980s or 1990s, it’s a Saturday or possibly a Sunday, and I’m working at BBC Radio WM for a man who actually scared me but I can’t remember his name. It’s possible that I am not as scarred by this event as I thought. But at the time, as much as I love radio work, I would head for BBC Pebble Mill with a stone in my stomach, I was so afraid of all I had to do. Looking back, I think that’s close to laughable because I was as ever the smallest cog in something, but radio requires constant concentration, minute by minute and sometimes second by second focus, for hours.

Quick side story. At this time I was spending my week writing manuals for some corporation or other. And I remember the contrast used to tickle me. In their office, there would be discussions about how tight some deadline was, and that deadline would be four months away. At BBC Pebble Mill, the deadline would more typically be the length of time it takes to open a fader, to slide a control up and take a microphone live. Both deadlines were real, both entirely valid, but the contrast delighted me. Plus I remember standing with a woman who mentioned how it had been raining when we left the office the previous evening and to me, having then done a shift on an evening newspaper, then a breakfast show spell on a radio station and then a day writing manuals, the previous evening felt like a century ago.

Anyway. I’m just putting things off now.

On this particularly memorable Saturday or Sunday in the 1980s or 1990s, I was driving the desk for a sports show and for the first time, I was on my own. There was a lot of this sports stuff going on and so much so, all of it apparently so crucial that the presenter who scared me was out at one of the games or matches or whatever they’re called in whichever sport it was. Tell me I’m not detail-orientated.

That presenter was the producer and via talkback from whatever ground – that’s the word, ground – he was at, he was still producing, but I was the central small cog. My job was primarily to switch between that presenter here and this reporter there, to switch over to the news, I don’t know, lots of different sources and I was the one putting them to air. I love this work and I still think an old Mark III BBC Local Radio desk is a thing of wooden beauty.

All is going well. But then even though every possible presenter was out reporting live from every possible venue — maybe that’s the word — there was also other sport going on around the world and some of it was apparently significant. So another job I had was to tell this scary presenter what the latest results from them all were. This was before anything useful like the internet or mobile phones existed, there was then no way for this presenter to know any of these other results if I didn’t tell him over talkback.

And there was no way for me to know the results either, except that like every station and every newspaper, we had a TV with Ceefax on. I would later write for Ceefax and relish it, but right then it was just this thing that showed me sports results.

Including what turned out to be a world-record-breaking cricket score.

I must’ve read out more than a dozen scores down the line to the scary presenter and he would then casually slip them in to his on-air commentary as if he were hardwired into sport everywhere. He was scary, but I think he was very good, too. Until the time came when I read out this world-record-breaking score and he did not know what to do.

It was such a big score, I mean, it broke a world record. And he was hearing it from me. Only from me. You’re on his side now, or you certainly should be, because even I wouldn’t trust that I was reading a score correctly. On that day, whenever it was, BBC Radio WM became the very last place to report on a world record in cricket, and BBC Radio WM was the only place to say live on air that they didn’t trust the eejit back at the studio.

I was that eejit. And as it turned out, I was completely accurate and correct: I could not explain to you what the score meant, but I was reading it entirely correctly.

Yeah, no, even I was and still am on the side of that scary presenter in this one.

You couldn’t make it up

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Long ago when I worked at BBC Radio WM in Pebble Mill, the sports department had a shelf of highlights on. Large spools of reel to reel tape with the recordings of famous local sporting events.

Only, I can picture that shelf now and I can remember being in that newsroom, looking at the reels and thinking well, er, no. These are not recordings of sports events.

They were recordings of radio presenters commentating on these events instead.

I’m not knocking the commentators, I’m in no way knocking the reasons for keeping the archive. It’s just that although it’s a slight difference, the tapes were regarded as the events themselves, not as the radio station’s commentary.

There’s something in that disconnection that I’ve been reminded of by all the writing about Donald Trump and Brexit. I keep hearing the phrase “you couldn’t make it up” and actually, yeah, you could. I think by now your audience would be a bit bored. They’d want some new characters, they’d be thinking we’ve got antagonists up our armpits, we need someone to be the hero. Anyone. Please.

I think the thing is that you wouldn’t make it up this badly. No matter whether you were commentating on events or especially if you are the poor sod who’s going to make a TV drama about all this one day, your very medium imposes certain things.

Commentators expect to be able to draw on previous statistics. TV drama writers inescapably want light and shade, they want pacing, they want to build to a conclusion.

None of that is available to us. It’s all dark, it’s all unrelenting and statistics are now alternative facts.

Hopefully this is just me but I can’t dramatise what’s going on. It makes me want to go write something else, to write about something or to create something that I can fashion, that I can explore, that I can convey something through.

We have the most visibly, publicly, proudly illiterate people in power that we may ever have had. Yet they are defying writers to comprehend them, they are controlling the disarray we’re in.

Maybe it will ultimately be good. Maybe this will shake us out of habits and patterns that we are used to, maybe it will make us – okay, me – writer better and deeper.

I don’t know about me and what I can do. But I do see journalism trying to fight back and I do see the writers of Saturday Night Live being on their best form in two decades because of it.

Maybe what I’ve been doing is trying to use writing to help me understand. Maybe I’ve been focused on the commentator’s tapes and really what I should do is go to the event.