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Pitch Publishing Ltd - Paul Armstrong

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108 pages

English

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Why Are We Always On Last? Running Match of the Day and Other Adventures in TV and Football is a fly-on-the wall account of Paul Armstrong's career working on Britain's favourite TV sports show (including nearly 15 years as the editor, defending his running orders) and a lifetime spent around sport, and football in particular. From a virtual BBC monopoly of sports coverage and working at the Hillsborough disaster, to the era of Sky, social media and megaclubs, Paul takes us behind the scenes at MOTD and chronicles the joys and pressures of seven World Cups and live broadcasts of varying quality. He provides an honest and humorous account of the seismic changes he's seen, both in broadcasting and the football industry. With inside stories of working with everyone from David Coleman and Brian Clough to Thierry Henry and Alan Shearer.. All infused with the pessimism and jaundice acquired during almost five decades following Middlesbrough FC.

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Publié par	Pitch Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	11 février 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781785315107
Langue	English

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First published by Pitch Publishing, 2019
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Paul Armstrong, 2019
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 978-1-78531-438-4 eBook ISBN 978-1-78531-510-7
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Prologue
1 Sportsnights, and days with David Coleman
2 Hillsborough
3 Travels with Motty, Cloughie, Stubbsy and Godfrey
4 A Whole New Ball Game
5 We ll be Back after the Break
6 Auntie Social
7 Any Given Saturday
8 Off Script
9 What happens next?
Постсцрипт Россия 2018
For Amanda from Stockton, to whom I owe everything. Including the title of this book.
Acknowledgements
To all at BBC Sport, past and present - broadcasters, producers, technicians and support staff alike - I m forever in your debt for the decades of camaraderie, dedication and shared love of sport. Particular thanks to Gary Lineker for writing the foreword, and to Andrew Clement, Michael Cole, Lance Hardy, Peter Allden and Gary again for taking the time to corroborate (or correct) my sometimes hazy recollections. Thanks also to Tony Bate, Ian Finch, Mel Cregeen, Phil Sibson, Jim Cullen and Jo Tranmer for supplementing my limited photo archive; and to two wonderful causes - Comic Relief and the Macmillan Cancer charity - for graciously allowing me to use their professionally taken images. As a first-time author, I am especially grateful to Charlotte Atyeo for her advice, encouragement and support, and to Paul and Jane Camillin, and all at Pitch Publications, for transforming my ramblings into a proper grown-up book.
I d also like to express my appreciation to all my friends and family for their support and understanding as I spent the sporting summers at events and worked weekends and late nights all year round. Especially to my wife Amanda for putting up with more of the same during the writing of this book, yet still finding time to dispense improvements in style and grammar. Finally, thanks to my Dad for first taking his six-year old son to Ayresome Park one crisp February afternoon in 1971, and to my Uncle Michael and the rest of the Chipchase clan for sharing the several highs and many lows ever since. UTB.
Foreword by Gary Lineker
Match of the Day has been the one real constant in my life, well aside from, perhaps, the first half dozen or so years and a couple of sojourns to Barcelona and Japan where, for obvious reasons, I couldn t catch it (no dodgy streams in those days). I watched MOTD every week growing up, occasionally featured on the show during my playing career - missing an absolute sitter against Villa in my first ever appearance when playing for Leicester - and post-playing days I was a pundit for a couple of years before eventually hosting the Saturday night programme when Des Lynam left in 1999. I have been the frontman of BBC Sport s flagship show ever since, albeit with a temporary intermission when ITV stole it from underneath our noses for three years back in the early 2000s. It is the dream job, of course, for anyone who loves the game. It would, though, be far less enjoyable and immeasurably more difficult were it not for those folk that whisper, or on occasions shout, instructions in my ear (well, not literally in my ear, even though obviously there would be bags of room) from a gallery above the studio or from a van in a car park if we were on site at a live game.
One such figure was the editor of the show. This person, for 15 years or so, was our author, Paul Armstrong. This is the guy who carries the heavy burden of putting together an hour and a half of television live - yes, live - every Saturday night. This is the guy who has to decide how long the edit for each game will last. This is the guy who allocates the length of time of chat and analysis between the pundits and myself after every game. And this is the guy who decides the running order. This is the guy who puts your team on last.
It is a tremendously difficult job. It is also an enormously interesting job and from time to time an incredibly frustrating job.
Paul was one of the very best in the business. For a decade and a half we worked together. He was a generally pessimistic soul, constantly worried, wandering around the production office rubbing the top of his head. He cared deeply about football, he had a real understanding of the game (Alan Hansen may disagree) and knew its history like few others (Alan Hansen would agree). He also had a wonderful sense of humour, which is absolutely essential in this business, and an ability to laugh at himself, as will become clear when you read this book.
It is a fascinating and little understood business. This book will give you a genuine insight into how sport on television works and in particular how, after more than 50 years on our screens, MOTD is still the immensely popular programme it is to this day.
Prologue
Match of the Day studio. 22.45pm. Any given Saturday pre-2014
Alan Hansen (live on air): Tha s inexcusable. We ve seen time and time again, you ll win nothing with defending like tha .
Gary Lineker (raised eyebrow to camera): Well, I thought it was a great striker s finish.
Alan Shearer: So did I. Lighten up, Hansen.
Gary Lineker: Next it s to Selhurst Park our man on the gantry, John Motson.
Director/rally driver (on talkback): And run VT.
VT (videotape) of Crystal Palace v West Ham edit goes to air.
Me (on talkback): Well done, guys. But we re a minute over now, so we ll need to lose the second run of analysis out of the Chelsea game.
Alan Hansen: But that was going to be a classic! Have you got your sums wrong again, Armstrong?
That was how my Saturday nights flew by for more than a decade. If everything was running smoothly, only the first few sentences would make it on to BBC One. A good editor is like a good referee: their day s gone well if no one s noticed them.
From the turn of the millennium until 2014, I edited the vast majority of episodes of Match of the Day. TV terminology can be confusing: I was the editor, a bit like the editor of a newspaper, in charge of content, the running order and the general tone, not the other kind of editor, a videotape editor, who actually cuts the pictures for each match edit. That requires a specific skill I never possessed, as does directing the matches or the live transmission of the show. Yes, it does always go out live, which is why it occasionally goes wrong or looks a bit rushed when your team, whom I d inevitably placed last in the running order, was then analysed in 30 seconds flat. Now that I ve left the BBC (ear problems and live broadcasting don t mix, so I took redundancy in 2016), I can only apologise for being biased against everyone and always putting every team on last. I did the job longer than anyone in the programme s history, and it only started to feature full edits of every top-flight game during my time in charge (and continues to do so under my excellent successor, Richard Hughes), so it was all my fault.
When asked what the editor of Match of the Day actually does, I generally trot out two answers. Firstly, you re really only the custodian of the show. When it started in August 1964, six weeks to the day before I was born, it literally was the pre-selected match of the day. Then it was two matches, then three and a round-up when the Premier League started. Now it s all six to eight games played on the average Saturday and however many on a Sunday, but evolution, rather than revolution, has always been the watchword. Like a Swiss army knife or the London Tube map, it s an easily understood design classic and you d be foolhardy to tamper too much with it. Even a slight rearrangement of the theme tune for a couple of FA Cup rounds in the late 80s led to questions being asked in Parliament, and a hasty retreat back to the original.
Secondly, when describing the editor s role during the programme, the best analogy I can come up with is that the director is the rally driver steering the show, and the editor is the navigator alongside him or her hoping they re holding the map the right way up, trying to anticipate the twists and turns in the road. Having been in the production office all day watching all the matches with the presenter and pundits (the best part of the week, by far), then helped plot the analysis, and talked to the commentators and the producers editing each match, I was also the cartographer who d drawn up the map, so had to shoulder responsibility if we ended up in a programme-makers ditch. Match of the Day Live was similar in that it involved plotting the studio elements: pre-match was generally planned and structured, half-time and post-match were mostly reactive, based around analysis, interviews and montages. That could go spectacularly wrong if, say, Hansen failed to realise we were live on air at Molineux, or BBC One wanted to skip extra time and penalties at 3-3 in the Steven Gerrard FA Cup Final because they had to get to Doctor Who . More of that later.
Part of the job was to anticipate the various ways in which a programme could go wrong and have a plan up your sleeve if it did. Decades of watching Middlesbrough had prepared me well for this role of worrier-in-chief. Gary Lineker - with the optimism of a striker who made umpteen ru