‘Leaving BBC was great for my bank balance, bad for my career’ – ITV’s The Premiership, 20 years on

As any Beefeater will tell you, the important thing about crown jewels is not to lose them. Match of the Day is a beloved institution for the BBC, most of the time. The programme celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, but has had two prolonged spells off the airwaves. The first came between 1988 and 1992 and the second was 23 years ago, after the Premier League highlights were lost to ITV.

Its show, The Premiership, is not remembered fondly. You may recall an earlier start, the theme tune of U2’s Beautiful Day, too many ad breaks and a novel new role for Andy Townsend, yet at least half of those memories have grown in the retelling. The programme was on air for three years and only aired in primetime for its first three months, at which point Townsend’s banishment to an outside broadcast Portakabin was also concluded.

When it reverted to a more traditional 10.30pm slot the show found its feet and revisiting it now via YouTube, it is difficult to see what caused the uproar of the time. It is a solid, well-produced highlights package, it just took a while to get there.

As we approach the 20-year anniversary of its final edition we spoke to the key players from this chapter of sports broadcasting history. We begin a year before ITV won the highlights, when Match of the Day presenter Des Lynam was poached from the BBC.

‘I was being paid quite a lot of money but not doing very much’

Des Lynam, presenter: “I felt that I was getting money for old rope at ITV, really. I was not really doing very much but being paid quite a lot of money. But that was their choice to get me across from the BBC and to pay me that much. I took it gladly and I’m now living off it.”

Paul McNamara, The Premiership series producer: “Des worked really hard. Those little asides, we’d spend a lot of time working on those. He’s one of those guys that the harder he worked, the easier it looked. But that laconic charm came from a lot of graft. Those one-liners, those little looks come from hours of effort.”

Andy Townsend, pundit: “ITV had a go at getting the Match of the Day package. I don’t think anyone really felt it would happen, but sure enough it did.”

Lynam: “I signed for ITV for five years, to do live football and other things, Baftas, things like that. When they got the Premiership it was a big surprise to me, actually. I wasn’t elated by any means, because I’d worked on Match of the Day for so long and knew it was a kind of treasure for viewers.”

McNamara: “I was at the BBC at the time. The news came through at Euro 2000 that we had lost the contract. Gary [Lineker] was doing the show and we were all devastated. We hadn’t seen it coming and didn’t really know what it meant. It was a really dark day for us. The feeling was ‘wow, we’re the BBC and we’ve just lost Match of the Day.’ You just couldn’t comprehend it.”

Greg Dyke, then director general of the BBC: “We lost the highlights but we won back the FA Cup. What I was always determined to do was to try to win back the FA Cup.”

Brian Barwick, then head of sport at ITV: “Greg Dyke was beaten up for not winning it for the BBC but was able to announce the FA Cup returning to BBC the next day. We locked horns a lot during that time. We’re mates now but at the time we weren’t.”

Dyke: “I see Brian Barwick, he sits four seats away from me at Brentford. To be fair he’s been around for a while, but he wasn’t there in the days when we had a whip-round at the board meetings to pay the players’ wages.”

Barwick: “He doesn’t live very far from me and I don’t live very far from him. On the night that the Premiership highlights rights were assigned I was in the back of a car and he was in the back of a car. We pulled up at the lights about a mile from where we live. He didn’t see me but I did see him, and he was shouting down the phone. At that moment I thought: ‘We’ve won this.’ For all I knew he could have been ordering a Chinese takeaway, but I did just look at him and think: ‘There’s a guy under stress.’”

Dyke: “I can’t remember any anger from Gary Lineker about losing the rights, I remember getting anger from Des Lynam when I inadvertently said publicly that I thought he didn’t suit ITV, I got a lot of s--- then. I said it off the record in a speech and of course someone reported it. I’d deliberately made the speech boring so no one would report any of it. We patched it up in the end, when Brentford went to Brighton we would sit and have a drink together.”

Lynam: “I never used to say ‘welcome back’ after the adverts or all those cliches they use. If the presenter of a programme I’m watching ever says ‘don’t you dare go away’ I want to break the television. I’ll dictate what I watch, not you.”

‘Terry Venables was charged with working ProZone but couldn’t’

The Premiership added bells, whistles and the emerging analytical tool Prozone to the classic Match of the Day formula, but its major innovation was a new early-evening timeslot. Initially ITV hoped for 6pm, to tee up its traditional Saturday night light entertainment programming but it was pushed back to 7pm. This was still ambitious logistically and even more disruptive for scheduling.

Barwick: “David Liddiment [then-director of programmes at ITV] was a guy who always had ideas and would always take a chance. His view was we could start the Saturday evening schedule with something as vibrant as Premier League football.”

McNamara: “There was a lot of talk about how we could technically get the programme on air at seven o’clock in a slick way, given the matches had only finished at five o’clock. I knew that Des wasn’t particularly keen. He’d gone to ITV and gone away from Match of the Day. But I think he was really happy to be doing it at seven o’clock because he got his evenings back.”

Lynam: “I was all for it on a personal note, because I’d be finished and off for the night, you know, rather selfishly.”

McNamara: “So the line came: ‘Better for you, better for me, better for all of us.’ I gave that to him and he roared with laughter so we did it on the first show. Every time I saw him for years afterwards he’d start with “Better for you…”

Lynam: “We were disrupting the viewers by forcing them on to a new channel with adverts, so disrupt them as little as possible was my view but it wasn’t the majority view. There were people who wanted to make abundant changes to the format and I think they got it wrong.”

Clive Tyldesley, commentator: “We are creatures of habit. And if the habit is a good one, why break it? I think that our mistake back in 2001 has been repeated by other channels more recently. There seems to be less love, for instance, with Channel 4’s England coverage and TNT’s European nights. I’m not judging either but the truth is the viewers turn on the football for the players on the pitch, not the experts on the touchline. As long as you acquire the rights you’ll acquire an audience. It’s always good to be aspirational about attracting new viewers, but not at the expense of serving your core audience. Perhaps that’s where The Premiership got a little bit lost, because I think our Champions League coverage was solid football television.”

Lynam: “Someone said ‘what we’ve not got to do is just Match of the Day with adverts’ and I said ‘that’s precisely what we’ve got to do.’ Because you had taken away a treasured programme from people who didn’t want a change, and now you’re messing it up because you’re going to put adverts in as well. So what you don’t need is other things, but I lost that particular argument. Dear Terry [Venables] was charged with working ProZone, but he couldn’t. It needed a lot of words in it and he didn’t quite have the words.”

McNamara: “ProZone was ahead of its time, it’s something that is still used at clubs today but at the time they hadn’t really worked out how to make it a television tool.”

Barwick: “I did have this idea, and it came from when we were aiming for six o’clock rather than seven, that if the players hadn’t left the premises by then it would be nice for them to be able to watch and analyse an element of the game that they’d been involved in. One of the ways we could do that is taking them into the scanner van and getting them to explain what happened.”

Lynam: “The Tactics Truck was a bit of nonsense which Andy Townsend got lumbered with and hasn’t escaped from the thought of since.”

McNamara: “It was just a bad name, it was almost killed just by its name.”

Townsend: “The name was most certainly not my bloody idea.”

Barwick: “It might well have been my name. I am very happy to take the hit on the Tactics Truck. It was of its time, possibly ahead of its time, but it would have been better-suited to a live programme than something which had to be inserted into the highlights show. Dear old Andy Townsend had to try and get somebody out of the dressing room, he got stuck with it.”

Townsend: “I remember Des telling the producers and hierarchy: ‘Don’t label it, don’t call it anything, it’s just part of the show – let’s get back to Old Trafford where Andy is with so-and-so.’ Of course they did label it and very quickly it became something which looked a bit daft.”

McNamara: “The press were up for having a bit of fun with The Premiership. Often when something is new the attitude is let’s give it a bit of a hard time. If you try anything new in television people’s reaction first of all is to give it a bit of a knock until someone else says ‘oh I really like that’, then other people say: ‘Oh actually I like that too.’”

Townsend: “Ally McCoist and I were two of the first to be standing out on a touchline, trying to do a Champions League night at Old Trafford when it was p------ down with rain. At the time that was greeted with a lot of raised eyebrows because everyone else was inside. On any given night now in the Champions League you turn up at a ground and there’s 20 broadcasters standing by the touchline.”

Tyldesley: “Andy Townsend is one of the best operators I’ve ever worked with. He’s a good analyst of football, it was just a rather strange setting. Oddly for a programme that was trying to be a little more eye-catching and spectacular, it wasn’t very pleasing on the eye. This wasn’t Monday Night Football. Andy was being asked to analyse in 90 seconds what Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville would do in 10 minutes.”

Townsend: “The concept isn’t that outrageous, but it was poorly thought out and it wasn’t really doable. To try to get players to leave the sanctuary of the dressing room and then walk across the car park, where all the fans were, into the television compound. A few bought into it but with a few others it clearly felt like it was a bit of a struggle. But I was up for having a go. I’ve always had a laugh about it. In television if you aren’t prepared to have a go at something and get a bit of grief over it then you’re in the wrong business.”

‘Cilla Black was unhappy about it, and so was Paul O’Grady’

Reactions to the first show were mixed, but not entirely hostile. Giles Smith’s review for the Telegraph was headlined “Where there’s Des, there’s hope,” but he also wrote “I thought the first programme was a pig’s ear, which not even Nigella could have turned into something edible... The highlights came and went, in a jumping hurry. Either the programme didn’t seem to know what the story was, or it was chasing too many stories at once.” Viewing figures were some way below what ITV had hoped for and the press smelt blood.

Lynam: “Everybody in television is bothered by bad reviews. You think you don’t care, and you say you don’t, but you do in your heart. Generally I was very lucky with the press but I always remembered the odd bad one.”

Dyke: “I thought the real problem was that they completely miscalculated who controlled the television set at that time on a Saturday night. It was not the male of the household in those days, and this was a time before people had multiple tellies and all the rest of it.”

McNamara: “The editorial got skewed because we started to put the best games last so we could pass the audience on to the next programme. That was a bit of an odd thing, asking the viewer to hang on. Your editorial instinct is to lead with the big game.”

Tyldesley: “The idea of seeing the highlights of the afternoon’s games before the last hotdog van had left the stadium forecourt was bold and almost visionary. But we’re all more comfortable with change when it’s gradual and organic. Doing it in that timeslot was revolutionary in itself, it didn’t need to be towing a tactics truck behind it.”

Barwick: “The first five Saturdays of that year, it was weather we’d never had before or since. I used to get home at about half past five and you could hear barbecues to your left and right. I used to think: ‘These are our viewers.’”

Lynam: “It was still British Summer Time, the clocks hadn’t gone back. People weren’t really watching football at that time, they were probably on a beach. It got a reasonable audience but the powers that be were very much against the earlier time because we’d replaced Cilla Black [host of Blind Date], pushed her back a bit. She was unhappy about it, and so was Paul O’Grady. They didn’t want it at that time. I got a note from the head of ITV saying: ‘Whatever they say about it, just keep your nerve.’ It wasn’t me who lost his nerve, it was them, because they pushed the time back to 10.30.”

Barwick: “We were told it would go back to a more established timeslot. It wasn’t a great moment. But you’re dealing with commercial television, it’s a hard-nosed business which has to make money.”

Lynam: “I wrote a note back to the head of ITV saying: ‘Now whose nerve has cracked?’ We all had a jolly good moan then forgot about it. It wasn’t digging coal out of a mine was it? It was watching football in the afternoon, we used to bet like mad on it amongst each other, then we did the show live. On the first show in the new slot I said: ‘Thank you for joining us at our new improved time.’”

‘At the BBC you went off air and went home, at ITV you then had a party’

The Premiership continued until the 2004-05 season, at which point highlights returned to BBC One and Match of the Day, who paid £105 million for a three-year deal – considerably less than the £189 million ITV had paid for their three years. On the first programme back Gary Lineker opened with “So where were we, before we were so rudely interrupted?”. What do those involved make of ITV’s attempt to reinvent Premier League highlights, nearly a quarter of a century later?

Lynam: “They gradually toned down the Tactics Truck and Prozone and it basically ended up as Match of the Day.”

Barwick: “We had a year to create the first programme, which was too long. We had so many ideas in it we almost forgot the football, but that was corrected within two or three weeks. We got criticised for a lack of action and on reflection that was fair criticism. But it was a problem of over-enthusiasm. Everybody had an idea and we tried to squeeze them all in.”

Tyldesley: “It was replacing Match of the Day and displacing Blind Date, two institutions. There’s no doubt that all institutions need replacing eventually. We’ve all watched great players bat on beyond their declaration time, but the incoming batsman needs time to play their way in and The Premiership didn’t get much. It might have got a bit more if it hadn’t come to the wicket looking like a Twenty20 batter.”

McNamara: “It was a good product, we were really proud of it. I’d spent about eight months of my life thinking about it. For it not to last more than two months [at 7pm], it was gutting really. Everyone worked really hard, we’d all given it our best and for reasons above and beyond us, sales, strategy, audience, all things above my pay grade, it was changed.”

Townsend: “The people that worked at ITV at that time, the producers, were very good and well-respected in the industry. They were always striving to come up with something different. Probably, looking back, there was a fair amount of trying too hard. Plus when you’re taking on the BBC, it was difficult. They’re the establishment. Now it wouldn’t be anywhere near as difficult because people are very quick to have a pop at them.”

Tyldesley: “The commentary team was Guy [Mowbray], who is the BBC’s No 1 now. Peter [Drury] is Sky’s No 1. Champs [Jon Champion] is a top operator. I’ve had my moments. So we had enough people that knew one end of the microphone from another. Any deficit in credibility came from the bells and whistles that were added.”

Lynam: “I had a wonderful career at the BBC, pats on the back all the time. When I went to ITV I got a little criticism. Everything I did at the BBC enhanced my reputation, on ITV it dropped off. But at ITV they were very much for you. At the BBC you went off the air and went home, at ITV you finished the programme then had a party.”

McNamara: “Whenever I hear the intro to Beautiful Day, I’m taken back to that time. Wherever I am I think: ‘Oh Christ, here we go, 4-3-2-1, cue Des, Terry, get the Prozone ready, it isn’t f------ ready!’ It was a bit lively at seven o’clock in the gallery, I can tell you.”