TAM ON STUART
The first time I saw Stuart he was leading a Dad’s Army of casuals
I first became aware of Stuart through his book, Hampden Babylon, in the late 1980s, which was a wry look at Scottish football at a time when there weren’t many humorous books being written about the game.
After that, when his name popped up on late night arty-farty TV shows I actually saw who the guy was.
He was stick-thin with quite a high voice and those shaded glasses. I started tuning in because I liked him – he was Scottish, and he was a football fan.
The first time I remember seeing him in the flesh was at a Motherwell-St Johnstone game. You know that feeling you get when you see someone famous when you’re on holiday? I remember feeling like that when I saw him outside
Fir Park that day. He was walking round the stadium with a wee posse of St Johnstone fans who, in their day, might have been some pretty serious casuals, but now they were like the Dad’s Army of casuals, and Stuart was leading from the front.
Stuart was a self-confessed football casual, right into the culture of the clothing and the music and the brotherhood of travelling to games together. But I think his career as a casual was curtailed by his far-travelling media career which led to him spending a lot of time in London.
Hampden Babylon put him in the frame for Off The Ball after Sanjeev and Greg, and when you look back now he was an obvious choice.
The original format was based around three people enthusing about Scottish football but only one was a serious football fan.
I thought it was working, as it was something different, but if it hadn’t come back after that first run then I wouldn’t have given it a second thought.
Because I’d been there with Sanjeev and Greg I think they thought it was a courtesy to have me on with Stuart. It was basically an audition for me. I expected after the first week that they’d try other people and I was just keeping my fingers crossed that a few weeks down the line I would get another go at it. But Stuart very graciously said to the producer that we should stick with me for the next week, that there might be something there.
Our background gave us an immediate bond, the fact that we both support diddy teams, and we come from similar working-class backgrounds in Motherwell and Perth.
I don’t think we’ve ever had a real fall-out. There was one time when he ate all the poppadoms when we went for a curry and he lost the rag with me when I pointed it out. We had an on-air row about an apostrophe, and I remember the feeling of sheer joy when a lady from one of the universities called in and calmly put Stuart in his place by saying I was correct.
You always hear about these couples who stay happily married for 60 years because they’re not in each other’s pockets.
I think that’s the same with me and Stuart. We meet on a Saturday morning and gossip away like Les Dawson’s Cissie and Ada do our preparations for the show and then when we go off air it’s a case of: “See you next week”.