It comes out of the blue every Saturday, 5pm, a weeky miracle, a seamless robe of broadcasting
EXECUTIVE vandals who abolished the classified football results on BBC Radio 5 Live’s flagship Sports Report couldn’t call the tune on a jukebox.
What are they going to scrap next – the shipping forecast?
Recital of the football scores at 5pm on a Saturday afternoon is not just a sacred ritual informing the masses who won or lost.
The soothing, mellifluous tones of James Alexander Gordon and Charlotte Green provided an oasis of calm after 90 minutes in the emotional torture chamber.
If the clots knew anything about the touchstone they trashed, they would know Simon Bates read the football results before he became a Radio One disc jockey.
That little-known gem about Bates’s previous incarnation as a continuity announcer is in the treasure trove of Pat Murphy’s definitive history of Sports Report, published next week.
The world’s longest-running sports programme on the radio reaches its 75th anniversary in January. If they keep chopping out the important bits, like the football results, Out Of The Blue – the call to arms which rivals The Archers and Desert Island Discs for the most recognisable theme tune on the wireless – may not reach its centenary.
Murphy, at 75 and with 41 years on the job, the longest-serving contributor to Sports Report, is more optimistic.
“I hope the programme makes it to 100 years and I think most people who love it believe it will,” he said.
“I hear the misgivings about the hour being halved (to accommodate live football commentary at 5.30pm), but that happened in the early years of this century and we survived.
“I also appreciate the furore over the classifieds, but the most important issue is that we retain a high volume of football at 3pm on a Saturday.
“I’m biased, because from the age of seven Sports Report was a programme I always wanted to work on. I used to tell my parents that as
From the age of seven, I always wanted to work
on Sports Report
we listened around the dinner table, and what a precocious, snivelling brat I must have been.
“But from Stanley Matthews to Harry Kane, Sports Report has kept pace with the sporting landscape.
“Eminent sportswriter Patrick Collins called it the ‘weekly miracle’ because from apparent disarray in the studio, with one presenter linking reports from around the world, it conjures up what appears to be a seamless robe for an hour.” From monumental FA Cup upsets to dramatic title finales, the programme has conveyed a breathtaking scope of football drama into our living rooms, cars and transistor radios since 1948.
Sports Report has also brought us unfolding tragedy, notably the late Peter Jones’s searing reflection on the Hillsborough disaster, closing with the devastating line: “And the sun shines now.”
And Murphy’s exhaustive cast of interviews includes heart-wrenching testimony from presenter Mark Chapman, who revealed Sports Report gave him sanctuary amid the devastation of his wife Sara’s battle with cancer.
She succumbed in 2020, leaving Chapman and their three children rudderless and bereft.
He told Murphy: “We decided I’d work on the programme for as long as possible, to bring a semblance of normality to every Saturday.
“I’d be driving home after the programme, energised, hoping that Sara would be feeling better but at least ready to deal with anything.
“It was horrific, but Sports Report each Saturday helped make me a better carer, a better husband and a better father.”
But with every shade there must be light, and the BBC’S long-serving rugby correspondent Ian Robertson supplies wonderful comic relief recalling his attempt to interview the great Nelson Mandela in 1993, three years after he had served a near-threedecade prison sentence. “Sir, there’s a punishment awaiting me if I don’t get this interview – the BBC
will send me to Robben Island for 27 years,” called Robertson through security personnel.
Mandela roared with laughter and ushered him into a side room for a halfhour audience. That’s the pulling power of Sports Report. ■■BBC Sports Report: A Celebration of the World’s Longestrunning Sports Radio Programme, by Pat Murphy, published by Bloomsbury on September 29, £20 hardback
‘They’ll send me to Robben Island for 27 years if I don’t
interview you!’