Dispatches From a Dilettante (6 page)

Local radio is mostly mundane low key action and I quickly rose to an acceptable level of incompetence. I say that but in the early days Radio Aire had ambitions to break the mould. Their initial staff list, all unknown at the time, included DJ Andy Kershaw, Guardian sports journalist Martin Kelner, Mark Mardell - now political correspondent for the BBC in Washington, Mark Easton Channel Four News and Helen Boaden currently Director of BBC News. They all quickly moved onto better things and, equally quickly, output dumbed down to the sports, news and ‘human interest’ stories pumped out by every other local station across the country.

At the beginning there was a week of shadow broadcasting. That is to say that everything was run live but never broadcast to the public, the intent being to iron out technical glitches, get familiar with schedules etc. I was given the second half commentary of a Rugby League game at Headingley which, despite my inane ramblings, enabled me to move onto doing short reports from various sports fixtures around the area. This was rock bottom in the broadcasting food chain but enabled me to see Football, Cricket, Rugby League, Boxing and Motor Sport at close quarters and interview the leading lights of each.

Budgies could be taught to do sports interviews which are mostly bland in the extreme, formulaic in structure and offer no real insights. “You must very pleased/disappointed/gutted with the result” is usually about as good as it gets. The footballer Frank Worthington was a pleasurable exception. In the corridors by the changing rooms at Elland Road, home of Leeds United, he looked utterly bored as I fiddled with my tape recorder while asking him the first probing question. The conversation went as follows:

“Frank…tell me about the goal you scored – was it an easy header?”

“Well it was actually….as the ball came across I leapt like a young salmon swimming upstream and flicked it in”

At last a footballer who saw how bland post game interviews were and sent the whole format up with genuine wit. It would have been even better if I had correctly operated the ‘on’ switch of the tape recorder in order to record this gem. It was such a rarity to get a memorable quote and I heard a second one the same day when TV showed a clip of an interview with the famous American quarterback Joe Nameth. When asked whether he preferred Astroturf to grass Joe gave the immortal, and for American TV daring, reply ‘I don’t know I’ve never smoked Astroturf’.

Later in the radio car at Dewsbury Rugby League and without the aid of a technician I commentated for a good twenty minutes, with what I felt was a growing authority and gravitas to precisely nobody, having not heard correctly in my headphones that they were going to another game. When I did reach a modicum of competence and said at one match, “and Hopkins converted the kick with consummate ease”, I received a major bollocking in my headphones about using ‘poncy’ language.

At best local radio is a low budget operation, which made the coverage of the 1982 Rugby League Cup final replay at Elland Road both an opportunity to cover a genuinely big event on the doorstep, but also an additional stretch on expenditure. I was deputed to be outside the ground standing by the radio car interviewing fans to get the pre match atmosphere. NBC of America were covering the game for their ‘Wide World of Sports’ programme and they arrived in a limo wearing bright yellow monogrammed sports jackets and had with them more support staff than you could shake a stick at.

They looked disdainfully at our little operation as they swept past us and disembarked from the limo displaying the confident aura of the big timers that they undoubtedly were. I later learned that their commentary team included Lyn Swann, one of the greats of American Football, whose elegant performances as a wide receiver were matched later by his ease and articulate nature as a TV sports anchor and latter day republican politician.

Meanwhile our one overweight, disinterested and frankly lazy ‘techie’ had eventually grabbed what he confidently assured me was a player for me to interview. What followed may well have been the first attempt to interview a non English speaking Moroccan Rugby League player on air and produced monosyllabic responses that must have had listeners switching off in droves. It wasn’t helped by the fact that I could see our ‘techie’ doubled up with laughter as I blundered on.

D-list ‘stars’ were wheeled into the studio for in depth interviews. Presenters with little talent interviewed ‘celebrities’ on the decline with even less. Predictably this produced car crash results. There were a few really interesting moments and my one encounter with then cricketer Geoff Boycott was one of them. I had managed to blag my way into the Yorkshire dressing room after a game and button holed Boycott who looked suspiciously at me, probably with some justification.

I have no recollection of the interview that followed because my eyes were drawn to his appalling hair transplant. It was as though someone had got an old pop rivet gun and run it along his forehead inserting a few strands of hair along the way. What was even worse was that these hairs were now there in splendid isolation as his baldness had increased to the back of his head after the first effort to conceal it. As I fan I had always admired Boycott but up close in conversation he represented everything that was wrong with Yorkshire cricket at the time - that is to say stubborn, introspective, out of touch, and self important. A suggestion to the sports editor that we should cover the demonstrable racism in the Yorkshire County Cricket Club hierarchy at the time was swiftly rebuffed.

What was required by the sports editor was bland hyped up and often falsely created excitement which was almost inevitably more that the occasion merited. I took consolation in the fact that I was watching, and being fascinated by, low grade northern professional sport and being paid for it. This was sport in the raw and, with a few sporadic exceptions, was far removed from the glitz of European Cups and World titles.

It was guts over glamour at places like Castleford. It was graft over gold on freezing winter afternoons at Hull where I once saw a rugby league player stretchered off during a February blizzard and later diagnosed as suffering from exposure. It was grind over glory when I could feel the pain, while simultaneously being spattered with sweat from my ringside seat, at professional boxing bouts in smoke filled halls.

Oldham used to play their Rugby League at the quaintly named ‘Watersheddings’ and I had been sent to cover a junior international between Great Britain and France. I had the usual press pass and an additional gold embossed one from the Rugby League which said ‘VIP reception – Admit One’. On arrival at the ground I asked the Commissionaire where this might be. Without any sense of irony he scrutinised the pass and then pointed to a wooden hut with disconnected guttering hanging limply down one side of a wall. “You’ll get a cup of tea in there”.

The Old Showground was where Scunthorpe United used to play and a less glamorous venue in a less glamorous town would be hard to imagine. On the few occasions I visited I could not help but be reminded of the very crude graffiti which used to adorn one of the rickety old grandstand walls. There was a long running and well known television advert for Typhoo Tea that had the tag line ‘Typhoo puts the T in BriTain. An away fan, I presume, had scrawled ‘If Typhoo puts the T in BriTain who put the CUNT in Scunthorpe?’.

One my third and final visit there I noticed that Ian Botham had slipped into the ground just after kick off and was sitting in the press box behind me. I tried to get him to come on air but he had just been castigated for making derogatory remarks about Pakistan and wanted to lie low. He did however give me the juicy mini scoop that he would be playing soccer for Scunthorpe United the following week, which he did.

One of the last big fight nights held in Leeds was at the now defunct Astoria Ballroom. Yorkshire favourite and journeyman heavyweight Neil Malpass had won on a technical knockout in the eighth round of brutal and bruising encounter. Both fighters were warmly applauded at the end and both had bloody cuts as they left the ring. I followed to get an interview with the winner.

After battering each other relentlessly for eight rounds they were now chatting amicably in the makeshift changing room that they shared. Their trainers joined in the banter but I noticed Neil looking very nervous. Having displayed the utmost courage during a fight that took him to the edge in terms of pain and endurance he was, it transpired, ‘shitting it’ as he so eloquently put it at the thought of having to have a couple of stitches on his cut eyebrow. “I bloody hate needles” he opined miserably and then visibly shook as the doctor stitched him up with minimal foreplay.

Just before leaving I heard an incredibly poignant story told in typically self effacing fashion by the man who was at the centre of it. The late Arthur Keegan was an extremely talented rugby League player who went on to represent Great Britain. In his early retirement he did some commentary work for local radio. He rarely mentioned the fact that he was a former international even though he was held in universally high regarded within the game. When talking to him after a game at Headingley, where we had shared commentary, Arthur mentioned in passing that he had made his debut for Hull against Leeds there in 1958.

I asked Arthur how the debut had gone and he said that he had only been selected at the last minute, and dashing to the ground could not find the players entrance, didn’t want to make a fuss, so PAID to get in. At nineteen he was already a player of immense skill and bravery in the toughest of games, yet so shy and lacking in ego that he thought nothing of paying through the turnstiles before eventually being directed to the changing rooms, from which he emerged later to play a blinder.

The end in radio came rather more suddenly than I had planned and Mr Boycott was, unwittingly part it. I had erroneously wiped part of another interview with the great man and his ‘bon mots’ were lost forever. While quite rightly being berated for said error I resigned on the spot. This was a pathetically futile gesture and one which went completely unnoticed. It was not my last contact with the station as, the tiff conveniently forgotten, I was asked to do a piece for them a couple of years later when I was Birmingham based. The result of this was their generous sending of two tickets for the last game of the season at St Andrews where, if Leeds United were to beat Birmingham and four other teams lost, Leeds could have been promoted back into the then first division.

I took my seven year old son to his first big game. The opening act of the massive Leeds following was to burn down a chip van which was positioned on top of one of the terraces at the decrepit stadium. After kick off results filtered through from other grounds and it became obvious, as Birmingham took a quick lead, that promotion was out of the question for Leeds. As a result their fans rioted at half time. It was a serious and brutal encounter which lasted forty five minutes. Police horses were deployed onto the pitch and the hand to hand fighting spilled into the grandstand where we were. I was concerned first of all with regard to our safety, not a little scared myself and secondly really worried about the potential trauma my son would suffer as one injured Birmingham fan passed within inches of us with blood gushing from a deep head wound.

Eventually the police restored an uneasy order and the teams came back onto the pitch. Seeking to reassure my son and affecting a forced tone of calmness I said, “That was terrible. ..don’t get too upset…what do you think?” I thought that if he externalised his angst it would help in the healing process. Without missing a beat he replied “I think Leeds could equalise in the second half”. All things considered it was the most interesting dialogue I’ve had at a sports ground.

During this stint in radio I had never quite left teaching and had been working at an inner city high school. Radio assignments took up a couple of evenings a week and usually two days at the weekend. With generous blind eyes being turned by my head of department about my occasional absences I just about held down a full time post, but was not spending enough time with family or progressing in either ‘career’. When the head teacher caustically remarked that she had enjoyed my commentary from St James Park on the midweek cup replay between Leeds and Newcastle and added that I must have had a remarkable journey up the A1 to get there on time for the kick off, I knew that I had been rumbled.

Both our kids were happy at school but I managed to first convince myself and then my wife that our future lay in inner city Birmingham and so that’s where we headed. There was however one earlier ‘brush’ with a major sport that was to have life altering ramifications, and a postscript to this one.

Although the head’s comment had effectively signalled the end of my radio ‘career’ there remained one very useful benefit which I cheerfully abused for the next five years. Over the course of countless visits to Headingley for the cricket and rugby league and Elland Road for the soccer I had got to know the commissionaires, who were all employed by the same company on a contract arrangement for match days at both venues. As a result, after my first few months, they never asked to see my press credentials. I carelessly omitted to inform them of my media demise and so, took advantages of free entry and the occasional bit of press hospitality whenever I was in Leeds.

“Haven’t seen you for a while” one remarked to which I truthfully replied that I had been doing some work in the Midlands. In the summer I enjoyed test matches and the lovely lunch in the press box courtesy of the sponsors. I sipped wine while watching Michael Holding imperiously set about the England batsmen, safe in the knowledge that I had no report to file. This all came to an ignominious end when next I arrived at Elland Road and was met by a security cordon that would have been more appropriate for the US Embassy.

The genial former commissionaires had been replaced by a different company and I was curtly asked to show my press credentials. I of course produced them while confidently engaging the man in carefree small talk. This came to an abrupt end when it was pointed out that my press card was five years out of date and I was ushered out with instructions as to the whereabouts of the nearest turnstile.