When Saturday came
James Walton
Last night’s 50 Years of World of Sport probably won’t clear up at the next Baftas. As part of ITV’s anniversary celebrations, it naturally contained several wild exaggerations – from the title onwards. ( World of Sport started in 1965.) Yet, for viewers of a certain age the result was a huge TV treat.
Central to the fun, of course, was the sight of Dickie Davies in his pomp, combining urbanity with winning hints of loucheness. As Frank Skinner pointed out, Dickie always looked as if he’d just returned from Monte Carlo. The loucheness was especially prominent in the clip from Miss Sportsworld 1976. While the camera focused unerringly on the contestants’ bottoms, Dickie did a fine job of drooling over what were then known as dolly-birds.
Now, younger viewers might be wondering what a beauty pageant was doing on World of Sport in the first place. The answer is linked to the narrator’s boast that “ITV has covered all the big sporting moments” – and, specifically, to the fact that this was a straightforward whopper. In the 1970s, the BBC owned the rights to almost every major sporting event, leaving ITV to scramble for material. When Grandstand was broadcasting Wimbledon or Test cricket, World of Sport
typically hit back with international canal jumping from Rotterdam or ice speedway from Ukraine.
Fortunately, Dickie himself was on hand to show us some of these frankly weird moments – and to display a more suitable level of self-deprecation than the hyperbolic narrator. His performance last night also proved he’s still got it as a dandyish presenter. Following one ad break, he promised to continue our “joyous safari through the sporting savannah of yesteryear”. Elsewhere he gave a rare modern outing to the phrase “association football”.
But yesterday’s programme didn’t just offer simple nostalgia – welcome though that was. It worked equally well as a guide to the more trivial aspects of recent social history. We were reminded, for example, of that strange period in the mid-1970s when the British public was obsessed with how many doubledecker buses a bloke could jump over on a motorbike. As a rule, the riders cleared the buses successfully and crashed on landing. (“And he’s into the ditch at the bottom.”) After all of which, we still had the wrestling to come…
Channel 4’ s Psycho season has certainly got a sharp eye for an intriguing tale – and in The Man Who Faked His Life it brought us another one. One night in 1993, a fire destroyed the Romand family house in a French village on the Swiss border. Jean-Claude Romand – a much-respected doctor with the World Health Organisation – was found unconscious. His wife and two children were dead. The police then made three curious discoveries. Romand’s family had been dead before the fire began. His parents had been shot the previous day. There wasn’t a JeanClaude Romand on the WHO’s staff. 9/ 11
It gradually emerged that Romand had been faking his life for 18 years, starting when he lied to family and friends about qualifying as a doctor. From 1983 onwards, he drove every morning to the WHO headquarters in Geneva – where he read in the library. Threatened with exposure, he preferred to kill those closest to him rather than let them learn the truth.
Unexpectedly though, last night’s documentary didn’t manage to turn a strong story into a strong hour of television. For a while, the narrator merely kept repeating that Romand “appeared to have it all”. After that, the double life was revealed with agonising slowness – even when we’d long realised what it was. The clichés in both the visuals and the narration (“Beneath the idyllic surface lay a deadly secret”) were so relentless that the programme often seemed determined to make the whole genuinely mysterious business fit the pattern of a bog-standard TV thriller. Worse, it sometimes succeeded.