The ITV regions (Part 2)

Anglia

After Tyne Tees, Anglia were the smallest of the ITV regions to cover football on a regular basis.  In 1963, they made television history by reaching a special agreement with the Football League to start their Match of the Week programme, becoming the first TV station in Britain to broadcast regular weekly coverage of League football. Anglia paid the League just £1,000 for the exclusive rights to recorded highlights of 30 games that season involving four East Anglian clubs - Ipswich, Norwich, Peterborough and Colchester. The first match screened was between Ipswich and Wolves, but Alf Ramsey's team were unable to rise to the occasion , losing 3-2 . Len Caynes, who went on to become a Match of the Week director and then Anglia's Head of Sport, was a cameraman at that match along with Stuart McConahie, later editor of ITV's World of Sport.

Caynes recalls: "Everyone on the outside broadcast crew at that time was crazy about football. We couldn't believe our luck, getting paid for watching football - something we would have been doing anyway."

Eighteen years later, the cost of screening Match of the Week had risen a few thousand per cent, but still not to the astronomical heights paid for Premiership coverage these days. By November, 1980, each programme was reckoned to cost Anglia about £7,000, of which the Football League's fee was £1,500. And the League paid each of its 92 clubs £25,000 a season out of the revenue it received from ITV.

.

Long-serving Anglia commentator Gerry Harrison.  He spent more than 20 years with the station, including six times with ITV's World Cup commentary team, eventually becoming Anglia's Head of Sport.  In 1993, he left Anglia to take a job producing worldwide football coverage for an American-owned TV company.  He now works for TWi, which produces ITV's Champions League programme.

Michael Parkinson briefly worked for the station in the late 60s.

Match Of The Week's regular commentator in the early years was pipe-smoking John Camkin , a former newspaper sports writer who also had covered soccer for the BBC. A director of Coventry City, he was a much-respected figure in the game and his commentaries helped win many admirers for the fledgling Anglia service. He was followed towards the end of the 1960s by another top commentator whose voice is still familiar to millions of football followers - Gerald Sinstadt, now with the BBC's Match of the Day.  Current BBC man Steve Rider also began his career with Anglia.

Anglia's coverage majored on the region's "Big Two", Ipswich and Norwich  Cambridge and Luton also featured regularly, especially when the latter won promotion to the First Division in the early Eighties.  Smaller local sides, such as Colchester, Peterborough, Northampton and Southend, could generally count on at least one visit from the "Match of the Week" cameras each season.  There were also occasional visits to such "borderline" grounds as Oxford (adjoining the ATV region) and Aldershot (adjoining Southern).  Here are a few typical lower division fixtures covered by Anglia:

21/9/74 - Northampton v Shrewsbury

1/2/75 - Colchester v Huddersfield

25/10/75 - Cambridge v Brentford

18/9/76 - Peterborough v Crystal Palace

19/11/77 - Southend v Watford

25/3/78 - Aldershot v Southend
 

Anglia Links

Much of the information in this article comes from the (now-defunct?) Anglia Gold website

HTV

HTV (or "Harlech Television") were one of those regions that covered local football on an irregular basis, depending on the fortunes of the league sides in their area.  These comprised Cardiff, Newport, Swansea, Wrexham, the two Bristol clubs and Swindon (the latter were a borderline case, who sometimes enjoyed visits from ATV cameras also).  Wrexham, the only League club in North Wales, were closer to the Granada area and so were occasionally featured on Granada's "Kick-Off Match", as well as HTV.

Their regular commentator was long-serving continuity announcer and sports journalist, Roger Malone.  According to the "Continuity Booth" website, Roger is now living in Bristol with his wife Judy and son Alexander.  He was succeeded as commentator by the indefatigable Hugh Johns (who became Huw Johns, for his new Welsh audience!), when the latter moved to Cardiff after leaving Central.

Roger Malone - picture courtesy of The Continuity Booth

When not screening a local game, HTV would broadcast LWT's "The Big Match".

Here are some examples of matches covered by the station:

31/8/74 - Cardiff v Man United - not a Cup-tie, but a League game; both sides were in the 2nd Division that season

28/12/74 - Bristol Rovers v Bristol City - always a popular choice

4/10/75 - Cardiff v Wrexham

4/9/76 - Bristol City 4 Sunderland 1- newly-promoted City had stunned the football world with an opening-day victory at Arsenal in front of the "Big Match" cameras. Now they easily defeated Sunderland, who had made a wretched start to the season.

As Sunderland were the opposition, this meant that HTV's football programme was also broadcast for the first and only time in the Tyne Tees region. Commentator Roger Malone hosted the programme and also introduced the quaintly-termed "bonus match" - highlights of Millwall's 3-0 win over Chelsea, courtesy of LWT

12/2/77 - Bristol Rovers v Fulham

24/9/77 - Wrexham v Swindon

15/10/77 - Swindon v Port Vale

8/4/78 - Swansea v Brentford

9/12/78 - Wrexham 4 West Ham 3

10/3/81 - Swansea 2 Arsenal 0 - also screened by LWT

14/5/83 - Bristol Rovers 1 Cardiff 1 - the final day of the season and the final day of ITV regional coverage

Lowly Newport County were very much the poor relations of Welsh football and I can find no record of a league match at Somerton Park being covered by HTV.  Amazingly however, they did feature in a televised European tie!  Newport's 1-0 home defeat by Carl Zeiss Jena in the European Cup-Winners Cup on 18/3/81was screened on "Midweek Sports Special".

HTV Links

The Continuity Booth
 

London Weekend Television

After "Match of the Day", LWT's "The Big Match" was the best-known TV football programme.  As well as being broadcast throughout the populous London and Home Counties, it was the "default" option for the other ITV stations (with the exception of STV and Grampian).  Any ITV region not airing a local match, for whatever reason, would usually screen "The Big Match" instead. 

Host Brian Moore, who sadly died in 2001, became the recognised face of ITV football.  "The Big Match" gave his first television job to Jimmy Hill (as a match analyst) and became well-known for its glitzy, innovative approach to football highlights, with action from 3 matches supplemented by "fun spots", viewers' letters and Christmas specials hosted by celebrity guests such as Elton John or Kevin Keegan.  Compared to the somewhat meagre resources deployed by other ITV regions, LWT were the metropolitan big spenders. 

"The Big Match" was also famous for its instantly-recognisable theme tune, until it was inexplicably replaced by a Jeff Wayne composition in 1982.  Thankfully, we can still hear the original tune and listen to the voice of Mooro on the "Big Match Replayed" programmes which ITV occasionally screen in late-night slots during the summer.

The famous "Big Match" theme was written by Keith Mansfield, who also wrote the themes for BBC "Grandstand", BBC athletics coverage and the opening titles of Wimbledon.

Brian Moore himself came from a humble background, as the son of Kentish farm labourers.  His autobiography *, published shortly before his death, is an enjoyable read and he himself admits that his early commentaries employed far too much shouting and hysteria ("I had my foot down too hard on the pedal"). Moore's enthusiasm and love of football always shone through and he had some quaint turns of phrase: when Don Rogers wasted a great opportunity in a 1973 game between Crystal Palace and Stoke, Moore commented that: "Rogers foozled the shot!"

His local team was Gillingham and he sat on their board for some years, as well as lending his name to their long-running fanzine: "Brian Moore's Head Looks Uncannily Like London Planetarium".

Although "The Big Match" cameras spent most of their time at glamorous White Hart Lane, Highbury or Stamford Bridge, the contract with ITV did require them to screen two 3rd or 4th Division games each season.  At times, this was forced upon them.  Here is Moore's introduction to the programme on 13th November 1976:

"Welcome again to The Big Match. And with World Cup preparations considerably reducing the League programme, we're able this week to delve deeper into the lower divisions - and as you'll see in the next hour, there's plenty of good football, great excitement and goals to be enjoyed there - as we've often indeed pointed out on this programme. Today, for example, you couldn't have had better value for money than the fans at Millwall got for their match against Luton Town - and that's our main game today."

The other games featured on that occasion were Lincoln v Tranmere and Port Vale v Brighton.

Here are some of the other lower league fixtures screened on the programme, including a 1978 visit to Priestfield!

30/11/74 - Crystal Palace v Charlton

22/10/77 - Watford v Newport

1/4/78 - Gillingham v Wrexham

19/1/80 - Brentford 2 Sheffield Wednesday 2

10/1/81 - Charlton 3 Hull City 2

(*  "The Final Score":  Hodder and Stoughton, 1999)