This was exemplified in Pat Murphy’s book about the sporting institution that is Sports Report, the weekly results and analysis programme that currently goes out at just after five o’clock each Saturday afternoon on Radio 5 Live.  As the book’s subtitle summed up, this was intended as a celebration of the world’s longest running sports radio programme, which marked its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2023, and which offered a splendid trip down memory lane, with lots of anecdotes that I found very interesting and plenty of insights into why the programme has always been so popular – and remains so today, regularly trumping the listening figures of its commercial and television rivals.

I must have listened to the programme often in my childhood and adolescence, though I think I tended to watch Grandstand rather than tuning in to the radio back then, because I was always a fan of the television first and foremost.  If I did listen to the radio, it was more likely to have been LBC or Capital, one or both of which may have had sports programmes on Saturday afternoons, but which I cannot immediately recall.

My clearest memories of listening to Sports Report are therefore from when I started my teaching career at a boarding school in Somerset in the early 1990s.  There were lessons on Saturday mornings and sports fixtures galore on Saturday afternoons.  The school had a staff bar in those days, which is probably not allowed nowadays, and we used to have a drink after the match with the teachers from whichever school we had been playing.  I lived about twenty miles from the school and I would always try to time my departure so I could be in the car for the drive home at just before 5pm.

The theme music for Sports Report, which I have learned was a military march called ‘Out of the Blue’, still gives me a lump in my throat whenever I hear it, and it was obvious from the stories in the book that there are many people who feel the same way.  In households up and down the land, particularly those where football is the sport of preference, Saturday is somehow just not the same without Sports Report and Out of the Blue.

The programme first aired in 1948, in an attempt to bring some weekend cheer to the gloom of post-war Britain, which was recovering only slowly from everything it had been through.  It was the brainchild of Angus Mackay, who apparently was taken home each Saturday in a BBC car to his home in Teddington.  He was a dour fellow by all accounts who was a stickler for accurate, crisp reporting and who clearly had a significant influence on everyone who worked under him during the twenty-four years he produced the show.  The ability to tell the story of an event in no more than sixty seconds, which is what Mackay demanded of all his reporters, feels like a skill worth teaching more effectively in schools, and it continues to be a driving force of good broadcasting today.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, which I found to be an interesting mix of new information, nostalgia and analysis about how the programme developed and how it might cope in the future in an increasingly diverse media market.  It needed to be edited more effectively in places, I thought, because it was rather repetitive at times and there were some strange imbalances.  For example, a top commentator like Alan Green hardly merited a mention and there were a couple of incongruous paragraphs bolted on at one point to claim that no one knew anything about Stuart Hall’s illegal and appalling behaviour, which seems rather implausible. 

However, it was good to be reminded of Ian Robertson’s commentary at the end of the Rugby World Cup Final in 2003 when Jonny Wilkinson dropped the goal that gave England their only triumph in the tournament’s history.  More interesting to me was to learn that Robertson was so far away from the action that he momentarily thought it was Mike Catt who was about to try to win the match because it was a right-foot kick and Wilkinson almost always kicked with his left.

I was unaware that the commentator Peter Brackley did the voice of Jimmy Greaves for Spitting Image or that he was such a funny man and a great after-dinner speaker.  I knew Cliff Morgan was a great rugby player and a very good commentator – another reason, if one were ever needed, not least in the week when we learned of the death of JPR Williams, for watching the Barbarians versus the All Blacks match from 1973 and Gareth Edwards’s exceptional try – but I had not realised the much wider role Morgan played in the development of sports coverage on the BBC.

I have not yet forgiven whoever it was who decided this season that there is no longer a need to read the classified results just after 5pm every week.  The excuse that they only have half an hour before the live match at 5.30pm seems feeble to me because I would much rather hear all the scores than listen to the inarticulacy of managers and players.  Gary Lineker apparently once said that footballers sound unintelligent because they are usually asked unintelligent questions, but there are surely only so many ways you can ask someone how they feel about the result of a match – and only so many answers that can be given in response. 

At the funeral of James Alexander Gordon, who read the classified football results every week for nearly forty years, the poet Ian McMillan read a special valediction:

‘Here’s James Alexander Gordon;
Soothing, gentle, safe, exact.
Giving a hint of Shakespeare to Accrington Stanley,
Raising 1-1 beyond reported fact
To a kind of poetry.  James, we salute you:
Your intonations kept our hopes alive.
Now sit in your garden and dream of those teatimes
When East Fife got 4, and Forfar got 5.’

The most poignant reminder for me was the skill of Peter Jones as a commentator and presenter.  Jones died from a heart attack in 1990, aged just sixty, collapsing as he was describing the Boat Race that year from a launch following the rowers.  I suppose I must have listened to hundreds of his reports in my late teens and early twenties, and I can still remember a discussion with a school friend who had heard Jones reporting on a midweek European match and loved his description of ‘scenes of surreal bedlam’ at the match, wherever it was.

Jones was commentating for the BBC at the Heysel Stadium in 1985 when thirty-nine people died and he was also at Hillsborough four years later when ninety-six people lost their lives.  His family say that he never again slept properly and maintain that what he experienced probably led to his premature death.  Again, I remember following what happened at Hillsborough on the television rather than the radio, so I did not hear Jones’s commentary at the time, but I have listened to it several times since I read about it in Murphy’s largely splendid book – every time finding myself in floods of tears.  It only lasts just over a minute, of course, but it is journalism of the highest quality.  You can hear it by following this link – ‘And the Sun Shines Now’.