Blanchflower’s lesson for footballers of today

Sixty years ago this month an extraordinary thing happened on British television. It was a moment that stopped our fledgling broadcasting system in its tracks, one which sent shock waves reverberating down the corridors of Broadcasting House and prompted questions in Parliament.

Legend: Danny Blanchflower, who captained Tottenham Hotspur to the Double in 1961, with the FA Cup

This was the day Danny Blanchflower turned down the opportunity to appear on This Is Your Life.

And when he did so, what most astonished the television executives was that anyone would have the audacity to sidestep an invitation to appear on the country’s favourite television show. Nobody did that. Least of all a footballer.

At the time Blanchflower was the Tottenham Hotspur captain, in the midst of guiding his side to the Double, the first club in the 20th century to do it.

And This Is Your Life was the BBC’S flagship chat show, on which Eamonn Andrews would surprise a celebrity with his big red book before taking them off to a studio where they would be feted by family and friends.

It seemed the ideal match: the man of the moment and the biggest show of the time. Besides, this was a format that traded in gentle biography not exposure, sycophancy rather than critique. It was Desert Island Discs without the music. Nothing to fear here.

But Blanchflower was having none of it. Andrews had arranged to meet him in a television office to discuss appearing on a football programme, but when he produced the red book and the cameras suddenly appeared, Blanchflower ran out of the door. When the show’s producer tried to stop him, he slipped out of his jacket and headed down a flight of stairs.

As he recalled later, his attempted escape took on an element of farce when the door at the bottom of the stairs turned out to be locked. Andrews caught up and pleaded with him to go to the studio for the live broadcast. There were, he said, dozens of people waiting there to laud his achievements. Blanchflower responded that it was not his problem, he had not asked them. And off he went.

Unlike Richard Gordon, the author of Doctor in the House, and the Goodies’ Bill Oddie, the only other people in the programme’s history initially reluctant to co-operate, Blanchflower stood his ground. He ignored all subsequent entreaties and insisted he was not going to participate. When news emerged of his refusal, nobody could believe it. It was like turning down an invitation to Buckingham Palace.

Intriguingly, the following year Blanchflower agreed to go on John Freeman’s interview show Face to Face. He was the only sportsperson to appear on a programme that had previously featured Evelyn Waugh, Bertrand Russell and Martin Luther King. And naturally Freeman asked why he had turned down the gentle This Is Your Life but happily accepted a far more intrusive interrogation, one which had, the previous year, achieved notoriety by making television personality Gilbert Harding blub on air.

Blanchflower smiled that, even on his way to the studio, “the devil in him” had considered refusing to

He rejected the chance to appear on ‘This Is Your Life’. Nobody did that

take part. But he went on to suggest it was This Is Your Life’s coercion more than any invasion of privacy that had annoyed him.

“I felt Shanghai’d,” he explained. “Nobody is going to press-gang me into anything.”

The irony is Blanchflower was not shy of publicity; he was one of the first footballers to employ a business manager. But he wanted it on his terms. Plus he said he always thought This Is Your Life was a rubbish programme anyway.

As it turned out, his stubborn withholding of his celebrity in the face of significant pressure to conform came to define him. When he died of pneumonia aged 67 in December 1993, his obituaries universally referred to him as the man who turned down This Is Your Life.

In doing so, he demonstrated that keeping aloof is ultimately far more productive than trading in ubiquity. As such he offered an object lesson for today’s footballers as they anxiously flirt with wider fame with every Instagram post of their latest haircut or newest car.

It may have happened 60 years ago, but Blanchflower’s deft sidestep of a brief moment in the limelight reinforced the age-old truth about fame: less is more.