From a wooden shed at Highbury in 1927 to part of the furniture
THE lowlight of BBC Radio 5 Live’s brilliant FA Cup thirdround coverage on Saturday was, strangely, the football.
Manchester United 4 Reading 0 was too one- sided. Sutton United 0 AFC Wimbledon 0 was lacking drama. Sometimes, the football just doesn’t work out for you.
It was still difficult to switch off, however. Good radio commentators can keep you on the end of a hook. Good summarisers, too.
On Saturday at Old Trafford the gentle North East tones of 5 Live’s John Murray contrasted with the clipped Glaswegian observations of Pat Nevin.
‘This is the most open-looking team I have seen this season, it’s shocking,’ said an aghast Nevin of Reading after approximately 35 seconds of play. He had a point, mind. Fourteen minutes later, Reading were two down.
Later at Sutton’s Borough Sports Ground, exuberance and experience blended off the field as the station’s Ian Dennis sat alongside former Tottenham manager David Pleat. Dennis provided the joie de
vivre and Pleat the detail. ‘There are some great names to pronounce here,’ said Pleat, providing a distraction to some mundane on-field activity by rolling three of them off his tongue.
It’s part of the sporting furniture these days, 5 Live. Of all the things it does, it doesn’t do much better than it does sport and tonight it will celebrate with a half-hour programme for the 90th anniversary of the first sports commentary broadcast in this country, a Five Nations rugby match between England and Wales on January 15 1927.
Exactly a week later football caught up when the same commentator, a chap called Henry Blythe Thornhill Wakelam, talked BBC listeners through a 1-1 draw between Arsenal and Sheffield United from a wooden shed on the touchline at Highbury.
Sadly, no recording of these early efforts exist. The Times was moved to comment, though, that Wakelam’s efforts had been ‘notably vivid and impressive’, and
The Spectator concluded ‘that type of broadcasting has come to stay’.
Interestingly, parts of the written media had opposed the initiative, as had the sports’ governing bodies. The former was convinced that live radio broadcasts would steal readers, the latter that they would steal match customers.
To this day, the same arguments remain but it’s not radio that is seen by some to have smothered football. It’s television and now, of course, the digital media.
Tonight’s programme will chart the growth of commentary and will feature some of its greatest moments and contributors. Mike Ingham, Alan Green and Bryon Butler will all be heard this evening and it’s worth repeating here the late Butler’s virtuoso contribution as Maradona sliced Bobby Robson’s England to pieces at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico.
We will never forget the ‘Hand of God’ goal but better maybe to think of this: ‘Maradona, turns like a little eel, he comes away from trouble, little squat man… comes inside Butcher and leaves him for dead, outside Fenwick and leaves him for dead, and puts the ball away... and that is why Maradona is the greatest player in the world.’
We have all seen the TV footage of that goal but moving images only serve to illustrate the startling accuracy of Butler’s commentary as Maradona undressed England from inside his own half. For one of radio’s peerless contributors, it was perhaps Butler’s own Kenneth Wolstenholme moment.
In 1986, 5 Live was still eight years away from being born. The station was to be a rebranding of Radio 5, launched in 1990. Before that, most of the BBC’s sport was broadcast on Radio 2 and often you would only get one half. The second one, obviously.
That, though, was still a great advance on that day at Highbury in 1927. Wakelam, a former Harlequins rugby player, was neither a trained journalist nor a broadcaster. After getting the job at short notice he had one practice run, commentating on a schools match at the behest of his producer.
To help him, and indeed the listeners, with the football, a plan of the pitch, divided into eight squares, was published in the
Radio Times. Wakelam could then say that a player had received the ball ‘in square four’, for example, and it is thought this is where the expression ‘ Back to square one’ originated.
These days, 5 Live’s experts arrive at matches with pages of multicoloured notes. Not much is left to chance. When people ask what they ‘do in the week’, it is this and it is called research.
Standards continue to rise and although tonight’s programme will feature some amusing moments — such as the late Raymond Glendenning missing a goal because he was refilling his pipe — it should be viewed first and foremost as a celebration.
Some things in sport do get better with age. The Art of Commentary, BBC Radio 5 live, tonight 7.30pm