still, this marked the beginnings of Soccer Saturday as we now know it.
Part IV
1997-98 BC (Before Chris Kamara)
I suppose, after the silly clothes, absurd reports and drunken misdemeanours, it was unsurprising that the show would change. And when some bright spark - I can't remember who exactly, it's been lost in the annals of time - had the idea of plonking four slightly overweight, ex-professional footballers in front of four tellies to report on matches the paying public couldn't see, we seemed to strike gold. It happened in one season, in 1998, and with the show's name changed to Soccer Saturday, we were suddenly working on a more football-based programme, which was a blessing because it would mean no more Velcro hats - or tomato-splattered train carriages. Even better, it seemed to capture the public's imagination, though nobody - not even me -really believed the concept had staying power. Who would want to watch four blokes watching football on the telly in a studio? Nevertheless, I began my role as anchorman on the nation's surrealist football magazine show.
Almost immediately it appeared to be good fun. In those days, Soccer Saturday started at two o'clock in the afternoon. We'd have an hour-long discussion with a panel, including Clive Allen and Mark Lawrenson, George Best, Rodney Marsh and Frank McLintock. It was principally the same idea as the show's current format, but at three o'clock we might move from football for a brief while to look at the horse racing or rugby. As more and more people began to discover that this was the only place to receive a comprehensive round-up of the day's football events, as and when they happened, the viewing figures began to increase.
Soccer Saturday began to develop into a word-of-mouth success – Sky never really promoted the show and some of our popularity came from the comedy of the afternoon. One idea at this point was for the panel to magically disappear from the studio desk at three o'clock. Each panellist would then sit in a little voice booth in another corner of the building to present telephone reports from their respective games. Why they couldn't stay on the panel and deliver their reports from there was beyond me. And why any right-thinking individual would believe that Frank McLintock had travelled from Middlesex to St James' Park to report on his game in the space of 10 minutes would require a massive leap of imagination.
This surreal situation was given an even stranger twist when our pundits piped their reports into the studio. As I introduced a new match, a picture of Rodney Marsh's face, say, would appear on the telly with his name underneath as he recalled the action at Highbury. Despite their close proximity, the phone lines would sometimes go down and we would lose contact, meaning the studio would be thrown into chaos. It was even less technologically-advanced than ‘Andy Townsend's Tactics Truck’ on ITV, and slightly more embarrassing. But only slightly.
Somehow, the show survived in this guise for a little while until a producer called Andrew ‘Buzz’ Hornet suddenly struck upon the idea of Soccer Saturday in its modern format. It was blindingly obvious really: rather than moving the panel into phone booths, why not place them in front of TVs on a visible panel so they could relay the match action more visually? With a studio facelift, we were away, and the current format of Soccer Saturday was in place. TV viewers were now watching a programme where four men watched live football on the telly. Almost immediately we realized it was a great idea.
I remember thinking the show had made its mark when I stumbled across a magazine interview with actress Patsy Kensit. In it, she began detailing the ins and outs of her marriage to Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher and described his surreal behaviour on a Saturday afternoon. This didn't involve hell-raising lager binges in his local pub, or hotel-trashing drug orgies. Instead, Liam's strangest act was when his wife found him watching Sky Sports on the telly, as four experts in ill-fitting suits watched football … on the telly. Apparently, she couldn't get her head around it, which was weird because I imagine she'd probably seen some very strange things in the Gallagher household at that time.
‘That's where Liam sits on Saturday afternoon,’ she explained to the journalist. ‘He is mesmerized by that mad programme on Sky where everyone is watching football on tellies you can't see. Honestly, that is the weirdest show I've ever seen and both my husband and my eldest son are riveted to it.’
She wasn't alone. I think a lot of other people felt the same way about Soccer Saturday at the time. Thinking about it, they probably still do.
* Apologies to Bill Bryson
So what really happens when Soccer Saturday takes to the air from midday to six o'clock every weekend? Well, dear reader, picture yourself in the following scenario and I shall talk you through a couple of hours of chaos and calamity …
DATE: A Saturday between the months of August and May.
TIME: Twelve-ish.
LOCATION: The living room. The pub. A shop window of Dixons, Currys, or maybe the electrical goods floor of any popular department store.
Ladies and gentlemen, you are watching Sky Sports.
Welcome to Soccer Saturday, a TV magazine of madness, mayhem and general buffoonery that somehow, comprehensively, details the afternoon's football happenings – goals, scorers, bookings, sendings-off, half-time scores and final results – as presented by me, your host, Jeff Stelling. But it's not just a goals and results service. From roughly half past two in the afternoon, when we travel around the grounds for team line-ups and injury updates, until the rundown of final scores at five o'clock and post-match interviews until six, we provide a comprehensive football news-feed. It is, as the Independent once argued:
‘The very next best thing to watching a game in the flesh and an unmissable part of every Saturday afternoon for those who either live on their own, or might be doing so soon if they “don't stop watching that bloody programme”. Apart from live football, it is the biggest ratings-puller in the Sky Sports firmament …
The pitch document must have made quite interesting reading, but if you love football this is almost all you need. It is hardcore football pornography and can be accessed on Sky Sports from noon to 6pm every Saturday during the football season and occasionally midweek.’
Sounds great, doesn't it? And it is, but of course it's also bloody chaos because while the show does have a structure, this is a very loosely-scheduled timetable and in no way a formalized itinerary of events. It's generally best not to plan too precisely for an afternoon of football action on the telly. As anyone in tune with our award-winning, laugh-a-minute, comprehensive, all-singing, all-dancing show will be aware: it's generally best to expect the unexpected, especially when match reporter and cult hero Chris ‘Kammy’ Kamara is involved. But more of that later.
TIME: 1:47
THE OUTSIDE BROADCAST
It's at this time that we put our already flimsy reputations into the hands of the goggle-box gods and set up a live interview with one of the many managers making their final preparations around the country. Now, in TV we always say, ‘Light, action, sound!’ but on Soccer Saturday we can get light, action, too much (or too little) sound! I remember we once managed to convince Sir Alex Ferguson to do a live post-match interview with us, which was absolutely unheard of. He never does interviews
