Lineker and co owe Greaves huge debt
Jimmy Greaves always said that the rationale behind Saint and Greavsie, ITV’S Saturday lunchtime football magazine that existed in a couple of guises before taking on its hosts’ names in 1985, was “to entertain and explain, in that order”.
Following the deaths of Ian
St John last March and now, sadly, Greaves, its reputation in the years since the programme was cancelled in 1992 has earned a deserved re-evaluation, focusing on its humour and the genuine affection both had for the game and its characters, rather than cringing at the catchphrases – “It is a funny old game, Saint”, “you kill me,
If you can’t find any fun in football, they seemed to say, that’s your fault, not the game’s
Greavsie” and “oh dear, typical Scottish goalie”. Excoriating it for the lack of earnestness and granular analysis commonplace today was to criticise it for something it was never trying to be.
It is easy to forget that at the beginning of the 1985-86 season, when the programme rose from the ashes of On The Ball, after World Of Sport was cancelled, we feared for the game’s survival. In the decade following Manchester United’s year of mayhem on the road in Division Two, which turned hooliganism from a parochial law-and-order issue into a social syndrome and national concern, football had dwindled to pariah status as far as the media was concerned.
That season, the first after Heysel, began with a dispute between broadcasters and the Football League that led to a blackout for the first 12 weeks of the campaign. From the most unpromising of circumstances, a show designed to review and preview action with no clips whatsoever, they were forced to improvise, film funny segments, talk about the game with authority and mine the minutiae of football from managerial malapropisms to Sheffield Wednesday supporters’ craze for fancy dress.
The style they had fashioned when Greaves used to appear down the line for three minutes from Birmingham for On The Ball, direct from his Saturday morning appearance on Tiswas, cheerful, knockabout, irreverent but also opinionated and shrewd, became something more substantial when they came together in the studio during those weeks.
Two magnificent footballers, loquacious and mischievous, managed to put the TV stand-off and the whole crisis-stricken sport into a less catastrophic context. If you can’t find any fun in football, they seemed to say, that’s your fault not the game’s. And by showing us where the foolery was to be found – the sign advertising Stoke City’s refreshment bar, “Try our homemade pies, you’ll never get better” – they lifted the gloom.
For five years, they attracted almost six million weekly viewers as they pricked football managers’ pomposity and brought some gaiety back to a game that had forgotten how to laugh at itself.
But it was not all about the larks and banter. In 1989 Greaves managed to conduct the most illuminating TV interview ever given by Mike Tyson, to that point, by the simple expedient of thorough research, a mutual love of boxing history and being game enough to climb into the ring with the grouchily intimidating world heavyweight champion and take a body shot.
Saint and Greavsie played only a supporting role in changing football in the late 1980s and had no hand in the burgeoning fanzine culture that helped to redefine the game. They were parodied by
Spitting Image and, later, ridiculed by Baddiel and Skinner. By the time the show came off the air in 1992, when Sky won the auction for the exclusive Premier League contract, their approach seemed out of touch and antiquated.
They were deemed to be trivialising football by those who did not remember that, in 1985, it really needed to be trivialised, having “lost track”, as Greaves put it, “of what football is all about: sporting excellence, entertainment and fun”.
Their gift was to make light of football without devaluing it.
They pioneered a format of ex-professionals talking candidly, engagingly and playfully about football, and everything from Sky’s
Soccer Saturday, shaped by Jeff Stelling, to the Gary Lineker incarnation of Match of the Day and its Sunday sibling owe St John and Greaves a debt. More importantly, though, when the game most needed placing in proper perspective, Saint and Greavsie were the men who did that for a mass audience.