Remembering Jossy’s Giants Sid Waddell’s kids’ TV smash hit
In 1986 and ’ 87, millions of children tuned in to watch darts commentator Sid Waddell’s drama about a retired Geordie footballer coaching kids – then it vanished from our screens. FFT learns what happened to Jossy’s Giants
Even if you remember nothing else, anyone who watched Jossy’s Giants can remember the theme tune. The exact plot details may now be lost to childhood memory, but that jaunty Undertones- lite foot- tapper? It still echoes from the 1980s. Yet Jossy himself initially wasn’t a massive fan of the song. “The bloke who wrote it had a pub band,” explains actor Jim Barclay, aka Jossy Blair, “and we all went to this pub to hear him and his band play this song. I didn’t like it! But Sid [ Waddell] and Ed [ Pugh], the director, said, ‘ It’s perfect’. I was totally wrong, of course: it’s very catchy and works terrifically.” Barclay duly treats Fourfourtwo to a rousing chorus of “We’re called Jossy’s Giants…”
Securing the defining role of his career at that stage happened in similarly haphazard fashion. Barclay, a stalwart of the early- 80s alternative comedy scene and jobbing actor with appearances in such touchstones as
The Young Ones and The Professionals, was originally considered for a supporting role.
“My agent put me up for a character called Bob Nelson,” says Barclay, now a sprightly 73. “I just happened to be in the office and said, ‘ Look, you’ve put me up for the wrong thing here – I should be going for Jossy’. I believe I sent my own letter in the third person on the agent’s notepaper, explaining how right I would be for it. Eventually they saw me for Jossy, which was very fortunate.
“It’s a funny story, because I was a bit late, it was a very rainy day and I had a motorbike. I found my way into the BBC Television Centre office in Shepherd’s Bush, but was dripping oil, wax cotton and gunk everywhere. I was flustered and terrible. Sid fell about laughing and said, ‘ You’re the first person to make us laugh all day – you’ve got the part’.”
The late, great Waddell was, of course, the iconic darts commentator who decorated the oche with his broad North East tone and distinctive turn of phrase. In his spare time, he also happened to write two series of an extremely popular kids’ TV show, plus a brace of accompanying novels.
“He didn’t tell me there and then,” explains Barclay, a Crystal Palace supporter. “I read for it and he couldn’t believe that I spoke like this [ a south- east London accent] until I started talking like that [ fluent Geordie]. And that’s what made him laugh even more; that a guy would have the temerity to walk in and talk like that when he was asked to.
“I lied through my teeth, because they said they wanted someone who was really good at football and not necessarily that good at acting. I had to lie and say I was very good at football. They said they had this story about a guy who broke his leg in his first game, but was heralded as a protégé.”
Having honed his Geordie delivery during childhood trips to relatives in South Shields, the ebullient Barclay clearly made a positive impression on a genial Waddell. The actor recalls: “By the time I had left BBC Television Centre, clambered back on my sodden bike and driven home in the pouring rain, he had phoned my agent, who then called my wife to say, ‘ We don’t want to keep Jim hanging about – we would love him to do the part’. That has never happened to me before or since… so it was definitely the best part I’ve ever got straight away.”
As for larger- than- life bookie Bob Nelson, that part went to John Judd, probably best known as the complicit screw in 1979 film
Scum’s devastating greenhouse scene. With the cast of mainly local kids confirmed, the crew ventured to Stalybridge – aka Glipton, home of the struggling Glipton Grasshoppers.
The first series of Jossy’s Giants finds the hapless Joswell Blair, his professional career cruelly cut short by injury on his Newcastle debut, now running a failing sports shop as he battles a debilitating gambling addiction. He is cajoled by a strident Tracey Gaunt ( Julie Foy) into taking charge of the Grasshoppers, rebadged the Glipton Giants as Blair seeks redemption through a series of victories on and off the pitch. It’s light- hearted fare that captured the imagination of restless mid- 80s youths – or at least gave them something to watch with their tea.
Barclay confirms it: “Everyone – including my kids – came home at 5pm, put the TV on and watched children’s telly until 6pm. There wasn’t this business of seeing endless shows on demand whenever you wanted, so it was great because that meant they all tuned in. They didn’t discriminate.”
As such, Barclay found himself in the novel position of being regularly recognised: at one point, he was mobbed by feral fans on a trip to Alton Towers with his family. Many were shocked to find he wasn’t actually a Geordie. Closer to home, while batting for his cricket team, he once ended up hopelessly out of his crease, only for the wicketkeeper to have a moment of clarity and, mid- stumping, drop the ball while bellowing, “It’s him! It’s him off the telly!”
But Barclay wasn’t the most famous face to appear in Jossy’s Giants. He took a distant back seat to both a World Cup winner and an England captain, at a time when you could simply ring up such heroes and ask them to star in your TV show. None other than Bobby Charlton, during peak combover mode, made
“BRYAN ROBSON WAS HOPELESS – WE SAID, ‘ JUST BE YOURSELF’ BUT HE STILL COULDN’T DO IT!”
a cameo in series one, showing Jossy and his Giants around St James’ Park for reasons of plot development.
“It was incredible,” recalls an enthusiastic Barclay. “When you’re filming, there’s a lot of standing around while they hang lights, think about it, talk to each other and apparently do not very much – so I spent a long, long couple of days talking to Bobby Charlton.”
As it so often does, conversation turned to Charlton’s stunning strike against Mexico in a key 1966 World Cup group game. According to Barclay, Charlton confided that, “I was so desperate – and we were so desperate – that when I got the ball and knew I was vaguely near the goal, I never looked up. I just let fly.”
“It went in like a rocket,” continues Barclay, chuckling. “But when you’re Bobby Charlton, I suppose you can do that, can’t you? He was a really nice bloke. So was Pat Crerand, who was there a lot because he was the football adviser and planned all of the action. He was a laugh, and had loads of tales about Matt Busby and George Best. Pat had an absolutely golden career because he was the first name on a team sheet. He wasn’t [ Denis] Law, Best or Charlton, but he was Matt’s man; the Roy Keane of his day.”
Series two featured another Manchester United legend in the shape of Bryan Robson.
Unlike Charlton, he struggled to act natural, which made for some cringeworthy viewing.
“He was funny, because he was hopeless,” laughs Barclay. “We’d say, ‘ Just be yourself, Bryan’. But he couldn’t do it; he was always looking for his marks on the floor.”
Robson did at least sort out some United tickets for ‘ Jossy’ and a couple of his Giants at Wimbledon’s Plough Lane – a derisory 1- 0 defeat courtesy of a Vinnie Jones goal. As Barclay and his young charges subsequently headed to the dressing room as instructed, it was made clear to them that they wouldn’t be meeting the team. The new manager, in only his fourth game – and his second loss – had locked them in.
Unlike Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford, Jossy Blair was, sadly, about to see his stint at the helm of Glipton Giants end abruptly.
“Series two did very well,” explains Barclay, “so Sid went off and wrote a complete script for the third. Normally you write a treatment – just two or three pages – but he wrote every single word, believing we’d get it done. I was thinking, ‘ This will be great’, as there can be serious money once you get to a third series. As far as the BBC is concerned, you become an asset to them.
“But the hierarchy of their kids’ department then changed hands. Two women took over and said, ‘ I think we’ve probably had enough of little boys playing football’. We’d all been so up for it. It would have taken six weeks to film in September and October, and we’d all planned other jobs around that Jossy time. Suddenly, we were told it wasn’t happening. It was a real shame.”
In retrospect, it seems quite a shortsighted decision – not least because the programme featured some strong female characters and even an episode involving women’s football, at a period when you could be burned at the stake for showing such heresy.
In all, only 10 episodes were screened from 1986- 87, arguably making Jossy’s Giants the
Fawlty Towers of kids’ TV. It even mirrored the anagram routine during the opening credits: for WATERY FOWLS or FLOWERY TWATS, see JOGSI’S NASTYS or SISSY’S ANTJOG.
Drifting serenely between film and video, even the action sequences were watchable, featuring the pioneering use of a handheld camera. As a snapshot of the mid- 80s – two incongruous punk rock kids notwithstanding – Jossy’s Giants remains a nostalgic delight three decades on. Imbued with Waddell’s surrealist approach, Argentina’s recent 1986 World Cup triumph hung heavy: “Too many prima donnas and not enough Maradonas,” he once chimed.
However, while the world’s greatest darts commentator could twist his tongue around the most outlandish of sentences, Waddell apparently shared a trait with George Lucas – if not his obstinance.
“Sid was very good at plots and ideas for television programmes,” says Barclay, “but he wasn’t good at writing how people really talk. So, what we – the four regulars in the show – used to do was get on the train from Euston to Wilmslow and rewrite the script. We wouldn’t change the plot, but just make the script more sayable. Sid was great about it. ‘ Change whatever you like,’ he’d tell us, ‘ as long as it says “by Sid Waddell” at the end’.
“Sid wrote a cricket one afterwards which I wasn’t involved with, on ITV. I never saw it. He understood how kids’ television worked and what they all wanted to watch. His son, Daniel – who now writes books about cricket – used to go and watch him play football. Sid would come away and say, ‘ It’s hilarious, all the tiger dads. Why don’t we make a series about kids’ football and have a good laugh?’ He was a Renaissance man and it was so sad when he died [ in 2012]. I went to his funeral.”
Jossy has recently enjoyed a reunion with his Giants and speaks fondly of them.
“They were all lovely kids,” smiles Barclay. “There’s a certain sort of kid: if you say to him at the age of 12, ‘ Right, would you like to be in a television series? You’ve got to be good at football and good at acting’ – you’re going to find them sooner or later, aren’t you? And they got a really nice bunch of kids.
“At the time, there was a feeling – like it is now, I suppose – that anyone could become a footballer if they had the talent; that it was a kid’s dream. If you make shows about kids’ dreams, you’re going to have some success. For kids, that was the quintessence. It still is. Not much has changed.”