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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsEntertainment 2005

Copyright © Desmond Lynam 2005

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Extract from ‘Another date with Nigella’ by Victor Lewis-Smith.

© Evening Standard Newspaper, 2005

Extract from ‘More gush than guts’ by Victor Lewis-Smith.

© Evening Standard Newspaper, 2005

All photographs courtesy of the author with the exception of the following:

Army Public Relations Photo Section/Klaus Marche 13(t); Bente Fasmer 9(t); BBC Photo Library 9(b), 14, 16, 23(b), 24(t), 25(b), 28(b); Empics 11(b), 23(t), 26(b), 29(b); Snowdon/Radio Times 27(t); Rex 32; Reuters 19(t), 27(b).

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Source ISBN: 9780007205455

Ebook Edition © November 2013 ISBN: 9780007560370

Version: 2017-01-18

DEDICATION

For Rose and Patrick

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

1. Daddy Who?

2. Not a Complete Banker

3. Taking the Mike

4. Not as Dumb as I Looked

5. A Face for Radio?

6. All Tanked Up

7. Gun Trouble in Texas

8. Gerry and Dean

9. Our Man in Moscow

10. A Call from Ali

11. Finding a Rose

12. That Was No Lady

13. Breakfast with Brisbane

14. Nothing Succeeds Like Excess

15. SPOTY

16. ‘A Signed Affidavit’

17. A Touch of the Dimblebys

18. Mr and Mrs Merton

19. See Naples and Dry

20. The King of Denmark

21. Sexy Football

22. Have I Got a Singer for You!

23. National Disasters

24. If I Could Keep My Head

25. Front Page Fool

26. Undiplomatic Service

27. A Briefcase Full of Money

28. ‘Use Your Sense of Humour’

29. Helen and Jill

30. Saturday Nights Again

31. ‘F*** It, We’ll Go at Seven’

32. Sir Alex is Unhappy

33. The D.G.s and Me

34. Good Cop, Bad Cop

35. ‘Herograms’

36. Orchestra or Chorus?

37. Anyone for Tennis?

38. Anyone for Table Tennis?

39. Retiring? Me?

40. Afternoons with Carol and Susie

Photo Section

List of Credits

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

It was the second of August 1999. It would be the most momentous day in my broadcasting life. That evening I would be all over the television news, the following day’s front pages and be the subject of columnists’ opinions for weeks. What was I doing to attract so much attention?

I was changing jobs. I was shocking myself in the process and obviously, to my amazement, a lot of other people too.

I had made my decision, although my partner, Rose, had been very circumspect about the move. She knew how much I had loved the BBC; how I had worked hard to get to the position I occupied, aided by a good share of luck; how I had fought battles to defend the organisation when it was under attack from outside, and often waged war when the sports department was being battered from inside the Corporation itself. But now I would fight those battles no longer. As I went up to the office of my agent, Jane Morgan, in Regent Street, I kept wondering if I was making the biggest mistake of my working life. I had one of the best jobs in broadcasting. The BBC had always looked after me. I was never going to get rich working for them, but they were family. I worked with a great number of wonderful and talented people, and I knew for the most part that I was popular with them. There were laughs every day. I had been given awards for doing my job, which I loved. Now I was about to throw it all in.

Had I lost my sanity? The day before, in the back garden of my house in West London, I had shaken hands with ITV’s Controller of Programmes, David Liddiment, their Head of Sport, Brian Barwick, and their lawyer, Simon Johnson. I had confirmed I would be joining them. The deal was that I would not accept any counter-offer from the BBC to stay. ITV now needed confirmation that I had resigned.

‘There’s the phone,’ said Jane. ‘Take a deep breath and the best of luck.’

1
DADDY WHO?

I was born on 17 September 1942, in the new hospital in the town of Ennis in County Clare, Ireland. For the privilege of being born in the country of my heritage, I am indebted to Adolf Hitler.

My mother and father had both left their homeland before the Second World War to forge careers in nursing in England, where they had met. Unemployment was rife in Ireland at the time, and would continue to be so for many years until the economic boom brought about by Ireland’s membership of the European Community in the Eighties. Like many before and after them, my parents had become economic migrants when still in their teenage years. Both, and entirely independent of each other, had been close to making their new lives in America but had been prevailed upon by their families to stay within reasonable reach of home.

They had begun their training in Bournemouth but had moved to Brighton in Sussex, where my father had become a senior mental health nurse at the Brighton General Hospital and my mother a nursing sister. But in 1941 my father was called up by the British Army to do his duty on behalf of his adopted country and joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. Initially, he was posted to Northern Ireland, and so my mother decided to go back to the bosom of her family in Ennis so that they could continue to see each other from time to time.

Shortly after my mother found out that she was expecting yours truly, Dad was posted to the Far East. I would not meet him until I was nearly four years old.

Mother, Gertrude Veronica, was from a large family, eight children in all, of whom she was the youngest. Her father and my grandfather, Packo Malone, was a famous local sportsman when a young man, excelling in particular at the Gaelic sports of football and hurling, representing the county at both, and playing in an all-Ireland final before the First World War. He was well over six feet tall and as strong as an ox. Of all his grandchildren, I am the only one to match him in terms of height, and I also seem to have inherited his rather large conk as well. When he was young, he had enjoyed a few drinks, but on his fortieth birthday he had suffered an almighty hangover, subsequently ‘took the pledge’, and never did a drop of alcohol pass his lips for the next half-century.

My maternal grandmother Hannah, known as Annie, was a beauty when young and in later life devoted herself to the family and to the Roman Catholic Church. She rose early to go to Mass every day of the week. Packo went to church on Sundays, but each night of his life he could be seen kneeling on a chair in the living room of the tiny house in which he brought up his large family to say his prayers – his ‘duty’, he called it. They had absolute faith in the Catholic Church and their God and gave enormous respect to the local clergy, several of whom, including the bishop, became Packo’s close friends on his weekend hunting or fishing expeditions.

The house did not boast a bathroom: a tin bath was kept for the purpose of the occasional full-body ablution, with the water boiled in large kettles on the turf-fired ‘range’. The toilet was outside in the back yard. There was no refrigerator, food was bought fresh each day, and of course there was no telephone. My grandfather conducted his business by ‘message’. People would arrive at the door, to book their horse in for a ‘shoeing’, or simply turn up, in hope, at the forge that was a short walk from the house.

My grandfather was a farrier, a blacksmith, with his own business, like his father and grandfather before him. In the Forties and Fifties, the west of Ireland had not changed much since the turn of the century, and people continued to be largely dependent on the horse for transport. Deliveries were made by horse and cart; the pony and trap was still used by many for their personal journeys and donkey carts were prevalent too. Business was brisk for my grandfather, and only the hours in the day limited the amount of work available.

The story goes that Packo and his father had decided not to get involved in those newfangled motor cars, probably thinking them a passing fancy. Henry Ford’s Irish grandfather, a farrier from County Cork, had made a different decision, and the family had done rather well as a result.

My Uncle Frank, a dab hand with car mechanics, had been persuaded to assist his father as a farrier and eventually took the business over; but of course he saw its decline into a virtual tourists’ showpiece as the motor car began to dominate our lives.

My earliest years were spent in a home full of warmth, fun and security. The house was in the town centre, opposite the Friary Church, handy for my grandmother. There were always visitors – aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbours – calling. Sometimes, on a Sunday, we would take the pony and trap out to visit a relative’s farm a few miles from town. I can still hear the clip-clop of the little animal’s hooves and smell the leather upholstery of the highly polished trap. One of my earliest memories is of being allowed to hold the reins of the pony.

I was too young to be aware of the horrors happening all over Europe – the bombing, the Holocaust, the terrible suffering. Ireland was a haven of tranquillity, having declared its neutrality under President de Valera.

My mother kept mentioning this fantasy figure called ‘Daddy’. I could not quite imagine who or what he was. This mysterious person had actually written to me from India, telling me to be a good boy and look after Mummy while he was away. This letter was read to me, as I was only three years old. I can imagine it not meaning too much to me.

Then, one day, a good-looking man in a grey pin-striped suit and a trilby hat arrived at the door, picked me up in his arms, and kissed me on the cheek. This was an invasion of privacy – and he was paying a rather undue amount of attention to my mother as well. I cried my eyes out.

Eventually, I must have warmed to this intruder; but, not so long after, there was another interloper, and I was no longer the focal point of everyone’s attention. My sister Ann was born. Of course, she had been delivered by an angel to my mother in hospital, a story I must have bought without further question. All I knew was that this new person was taking up a vast amount of my mother’s time and interest, and for the first time in my young life I felt the pangs of jealousy. My grandmother had to take me to one side and explain that Mummy certainly loved me the best but, because Ann was so small, she needed to be specially looked after.

But the ‘looking after’ wasn’t enough to save her young life. Within six or seven weeks of her birth, she died of meningitis.

While I remember my baby sister arriving, I have no clear memory of her death or that it affected me very much at the time. I suppose I was shielded from it, and my grandparents would have explained it all as ‘the will of God’. I have often wondered what sort of person Ann would have grown into and what effect she would have had on my life.

Obviously my mother and father were distraught at the loss. Soon afterwards they decided to take up their jobs in England again, and I found myself on the train to Limerick and Dublin and then the mail boat crossing from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead in North Wales, a journey I was to experience almost every year during my childhood as we went ‘home’ for the summer holidays.

My parents had rented a flat in Brighton before the war but now needed a new home. At first we became lodgers in the house of one of Dad’s work colleagues, who had two sons, both older than me. I didn’t take to them, and the feeling was entirely mutual. They continually mocked me when I spoke. I could not understand why, but of course I had a broad County Clare accent and they couldn’t make out a word I said, and neither could their parents.

Pretty soon we moved to a brand new council house, the building of which was virtually going on around us. Amongst the labourers were German prisoners of war, yet to be repatriated. I learned, much later, that they were treated badly by some of our new neighbours, but my Dad showed them respect. His view was that they were probably family men like him whose lives, like his, had been disrupted for five years through no fault of their own. Soon they disappeared back to their homeland, and I was disappearing off to school.

St John the Baptist Roman Catholic Primary School was a pretty dismal-looking place in a poor part of the town run by a combination of nuns and lay teachers. Most of the kids were from Irish or Italian Catholic families, but I was the only one nobody could understand, for a while at least. My earliest memory of school is of being asked to draw a line. I drew a funny little animal with four legs. For me a line, with my Irish accent, was a tiger without the stripes. The teacher thought I was mucking about. My parents told me that within a few months, the Irish accent had disappeared and I became like the other kids in my speech patterns, unlike my parents, who retained their Irish accents all their lives.

Once I could make myself understood I became accepted by my infant peers and I began to enjoy going to school. I worked out pretty soon too that I wasn’t the dullest in the class by a long way. Within a year, though, I was to be out of school for nearly three months. I had been complaining of stomach ache and a local doctor had diagnosed indigestion, told my mother not to let me eat apples, prescribed some milk of magnesia, and said I would be alright in a day or two. Over the next few days, I gave them great cause for worry. I developed spots, which my father immediately knew was measles, and the stomach pains were getting worse. Dad telephoned another doctor, Dr John O’Hara, who saved my life and whom I met again thirty years later when he was on the council of the Football Association. Dr John immediately diagnosed a septic appendix: I was in a fever with the measles, and now needed an urgent operation as well. My parents, having lost Ann a short time before, were now close to losing me. The appendix was taken out – probably in a hurry. The scar is still prominent all these years later. After the operation, I was removed to an isolation hospital, where I would remain for some weeks. When I eventually returned home, I must have looked a very poor specimen indeed. I could scarcely walk, having been bedridden for so long, and for weeks my mother had to take me to a clinic for physiotherapy to help me get the use of my legs again.

I didn’t like this place called England. First they mocked the way you speak, and then you got hit with not one, but two serious illnesses at once. I wanted to go back to Ireland, and said so in no uncertain terms. But, in time, I settled into the rhythm of my new life in Brighton. In those days, everyone who had been given a council house seemed to be inordinately proud of it. Gardens were tended with great enthusiasm – my father won several prizes for his garden; doors were regularly re-painted, and windows sparkled. We had a refrigerator, which was unusual for working-class people in the late Forties and early Fifties. Few of our neighbours had a car. If they did it was usually a pre-war model. My Dad cycled the four or five miles to the hospital where he worked, but after a time was able to afford a modest motorcycle combination. The bike was a 500 cc BSA with a Watsonian sidecar capable of seating my mother, with me behind her. It was a very fragile piece of equipment and seemed to be made largely of plywood, covered with a black lining. These ‘combinations’ were very popular in those days, being cheaper to run than cars. You rarely see one now. Sometimes, when the weather was good, I was allowed to sit on the pillion seat behind Dad. This was long before crash helmets were deemed compulsory, or indeed necessary. We often went up to London to see relatives by this mode of transport and once went all the way to Ireland, singing at the tops of our voices as we meandered through the country roads of Wales to the boat train at Fishguard. That sort of happiness should be bottled.

At school I was progressing from cowboys and indians to football and cricket. I also sang in the school choir – our rendition of ‘Panis Angelicus’ won us first prize in the Sussex schools’ competition. My best pal was Micky Weller and I was in love with a pretty girl called Janice Prossor. I usually showed my passion for her by chasing her round the playground. It was unrequited love, but I did manage to kiss her once. Sheer bliss. It gave me a wonderful tingling feeling of which I have never tired.

In class, I was doing well under the guidance of Miss Thornton and Mr Beech, but being a Catholic school we were consumed with religious instruction that took up around an hour of each day. I kept hearing about the Immaculate Conception many years before I knew what immaculate or conception meant, never mind the two of them together. It was a wonder we had time for the academic stuff.

I got into a few fights in the playground, won a couple, lost a couple. Steeled myself not to cry when I lost, but the emotions usually got the better of me when I won. In summer evenings I would gather in the local park with a few other boys and we would play cricket till dark.

Although we had little money, my parents loved to go to the local variety theatre, when the housekeeping budget allowed, to see some of the great comics of the day, and I went with them. They had heard Frankie Howerd, Jimmy Edwards, Max Bygraves and Max Miller on radio; and in those pre-television days, or at least before most people had TVs, this was the way to see your favourites. The Brighton Hippodrome was usually packed when a big name came to town, which happened regularly. The theatre was a ‘number one’; that is to say, the top-line acts would appear there. As well as those mentioned above, I remember seeing Tony Hancock, Vic Oliver, and even Laurel and Hardy live on stage. And of course we never missed a pantomime. To this day I can smell the red velour seats and remember the anticipation as the orchestra struck up their introduction to the evening or matinee.

But each year, Mum and Dad and I would set out for ‘home’. This was a trip back to Ireland for two or three weeks. While my pals were enjoying Brighton beach, I would be spending my time with the family, either in Ennis or at my Dad’s village, Boris in Ossery, in the county of Laois in the midlands of Ireland. I would usually return to Brighton, pale as death in contrast to my sun-tanned pals, having suffered from the wet Hibernian climate.

When in Ennis, I would go to my grandfather’s forge and spend hours pulling the bellows to heat up the fire for smelting the horseshoes. There, I would listen to stories and jokes as the men got about their work. I learned not to be afraid of horses, but never to stand behind them. The forge seemed to be the meeting place for many boys after school or on Saturdays, and I remember a great atmosphere of camaraderie. I was now occasionally ribbed for my English accent. What a turnaround.

On Sundays it was off to Mass, then lunch and either a trip to the country or, more likely, down to Cusack Park to watch a hurling or Gaelic football match. My grandfather was known to everyone and his former sporting prowess earned him a good deal of respect. He proudly introduced me to people, and being ‘Packo’s’ grandson seemed to give me some reflected glory. I learned how to use a hurly stick and, a lifetime later, I was walking in Richmond Park one day when I came across two Irish boys smacking a ball between them with hurlies. ‘Can I have a go?’ I asked. They were amazed that I could pick up the ball with the stick, control it at speed, and fire it to them accurately.

I loved being in Ennis, but would also spend a while at the home of my paternal grandparents, Joseph and Bridget Lynam. Joe was a signalman on the railway, a task he combined with running a small farm. Between them they produced no fewer than fifteen children, most of whom survived into old age, a couple of them into their late nineties.

Once, when I was about fourteen, I cheekily suggested to my Dad that grandfather must have been a sex maniac. Dad, rather amused, reckoned that his father might only have had sex fifteen times. Can you imagine bringing up that many children in a small farmhouse, with no modern conveniences, on low pay and no benefits? Well they all ate well, all went to school, all ended up with responsible jobs, and the only case of lawbreaking in the family was when Uncle Gerald was had up for a bit of poaching. My grandparents set standards for their children that were adhered to throughout their lives.

I was always frightened in the house at night. My parents, with my grandmother (who liked a Guinness) and other family members and friends, would go off to one of the many pubs in the village. I would be left in the house with my teetotal grandfather. I was always given a room that had a picture of Jesus Christ on the Cross wearing the crown of thorns; his eyes always seemed to be staring right at me. Whichever way I turned in the bed, the eyes never left me. I never slept a wink until daybreak. Then I could never get up.

Bridget and Joe Lynam were as different as chalk and cheese, underlining the old adage that opposites attract. Joe was straightforward, hardworking, and very literate. He could quote Shakespeare readily, and enjoyed most of the plays. He particularly liked George Bernard Shaw, a man of his own vintage. Bridget was somewhat capricious, with a ready wit. She liked a drink and whenever a visitor with similar tastes arrived at the house, she would ensconce herself in the ‘parlour’ to pour the guest a glass of Guinness. Then she would liberally imbibe herself. The theory was that Joe knew nothing of this habit, but of course he wasn’t that stupid and left her to her own devices.

To this day I remember some of Granny’s sayings. About someone always complaining about their aches and pains, she would say, ‘He’s never without an arse or an elbow’. If she saw an odd looking couple, she would remark that ‘Every old shoe meets an old sock’; or on seeing someone strange she might say, ‘It’s amazing what you see when you haven’t got a gun.’

She told stories about the village cheapskate, a lady who, when it was her round, would describe the Guinness as having got ‘very bitter’ until it was someone else’s round. Her favourite one was when someone came up with something she had missed. ‘You’re an eejit but you’re right,’ she’d say. Bridget was quite a lady, a lady who had endured being pregnant over nineteen summers of her life.

But it was back in England that I remember enjoying one of the best days of my life. I was ten years of age and it was Christmas morning. I had received a great array of presents, everything I could have wished for, when Dad called me from the kitchen. ‘There’s something here in a big parcel,’ he said. ‘What can this be?’

I ran in, and there underneath the cardboard wrappings was a brand new Raleigh bicycle. I don’t think at any time in my life since have I exceeded the happiness of that moment.

But that morning, a boy who lived across the road learned that his mother, who was probably only in her early thirties, had suddenly died – on Christmas Day. I could see his pale face looking through the window of his house, tears streaming down. I took my bike several streets away to ride it. I didn’t want to display my happiness in front of his abject misery.

As I went through my years at junior school, it became clear that I had a good chance of passing the Eleven-Plus examination. In every test I usually came top or near the top of the class. When the examination came round, Dad promised me a cricket bat if I passed, which I did. I still have the bat, with the signature of the then famous England captain Len Hutton inscribed on it. Years later when I interviewed Len, who had long been retired, he asked me to sign an autograph for him, for his grandchild. How could I have imagined at eleven years of age such a turn of events? Dad told me later that the bat would have been mine even if I had not passed the exam. ‘You would have had it for trying your best,’ he said.

Janice Prossor was also successful. My pal Micky Weller was not. He was distraught and deemed to be a failure at that tender age. Whenever I hear arguments in favour of that life-changing test, I think of Micky’s tears.

And so, in September 1954, I was off to Varndean Grammar School for Boys along with Pat Dale, Ron Cavadeschi and Geoff Macklin, who had also picked up enough information at St John the Baptist – in addition to the catechism and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception – to win places to Varndean.

I was now the proud possessor of a red blazer with black piping and a ‘Just William’ style cap, similarly decorated. The blazer was a bit on the large side. It had to last. I found myself studying subjects like Latin and Chemistry and Physics, playing sports on Thursday afternoons on the spacious playing fields, and being introduced to the marvellous game of chess, which I enjoy to this day.

For a time I was a member of the Army section of the Combined Cadet Force, which was compulsory for a year. I learned how to fire a rifle and a Bren gun and march up and down. On our first day a boy called Douglas Pitt, later a university professor, volunteered to show us how to march at the request of the officer in charge. He did so with his left arm and left leg in unison rather than right arm, left leg. We were hysterical with laughter, and so was the officer/master in charge of us. Another cadet, Eric Cager, when asked what he thought camouflage meant, replied, ‘Is it when we put trees on our heads, sir?’ I enjoyed all that; but what I hated was getting on the school bus on ‘Cadet’s Day’ in my army gaiters and heavy boots and being the subject of much ridicule as the local ‘secondary moderns’ spent the ride saluting and making wisecracks. I made some great new friends at the school, in particular Doug Hillman, with whom I still play tennis nearly half a century later, and Charlie Trinder, whom I visit in America, and many others.

And I discovered Brighton and Hove Albion.

I had of course heard a great deal about the local professional team and knew the names of the players, but I had never been to the famous old Goldstone Ground in Hove until a neighbour, Bob Seymour, invited me along with his two daughters. They were of a similar age to me, and I was desperately in love with both of them, though they treated me with considerable disdain. I had been looking forward to the experience for weeks. We arrived, me in particular in a high state of excitement, and found ourselves, standing of course, behind the goal in the north enclosure. Being small, we were helped to the front. These were the days when football crowds were sporting and friendly, long before hooliganism took its ugly hold on the game. In the kick-in before the match started, a Brighton player called Des Tenant (my favourite because he shared my Christian name) fired the ball past the goal and flush into the face of one of Bob’s daughters, who had not been quick enough to get out of the way. She was knocked down and out. Off we went to casualty, where she was revived and checked over for any serious head injury. I described the incident years later as my first experience of a woman’s headache getting in the way of a lot of fun. My enthusiasm for the club was undimmed by this experience, however, and I have been a lifelong fan during their ups and downs, of which there have been many.

I played football for the school and took up tennis instead of cricket, although I continued to play the latter in the park on summer evenings. And I found myself shooting up from about five foot three to six feet tall. Suddenly I was gangly, and very self-conscious of it. Luckily, my mother told me to stop stooping and be proud of my height.

My first form master at the grammar school was Michael Wylie, known as ‘Bubble’ for his rounded features and frame, under whose care and guidance I soon began to excel in class, especially at English, Maths and Latin, and I was marked out as having university potential. I took part in a couple of ‘house’ plays but was never ambitious enough to go the whole hog and try for a part in the school’s annual Shakespearian production.

Meanwhile, my mother, who was a good dancer, persuaded me to enrol for ballroom dancing lessons at the Court School of Dancing. ‘You don’t want to be an eejit all your life, with two left feet,’ she said, and so, rather sulkily, off I went, to be clutched to the bosom of some old lady of about twenty-eight years of age as she tried to instil in me the basic moves of the quick step, the foxtrot and the waltz. I was much more interested in her bosom and found myself sexually aroused as she held me tightly. I think she was having some fun at my expense as she nodded and winked to her fellow instructress whenever I took to the floor with her. On Saturday nights there would be a free dance night when all the pupils and guests would turn up to show off their limited skills. It was full of pretty girls outnumbering the men and boys by about three to one. I had a whale of a time.

Back at school, my academic ambitions waned, and although I managed a good crop of exam results I could not envisage putting my parents through three extra years of struggle to keep me studying, and so I left without going on to university. My father, who might have been a doctor had he had the chance to further his schooling, had thoughts that I might be able to move in that direction; but having absolutely no ability whatsoever in science subjects, that hope went out of the window. I wanted to be a journalist, or, as I saw it, a newspaper man. We read the Daily Mirror at home and I was a big fan of their chief sportswriter, Peter Wilson, whom I got to know many years later. His by-line described him as ‘The Man They Can’t Gag’. I also avidly read William Connor, the columnist who wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Cassandra’, the prophetess of doom, and who extraordinarily lost a libel case to the American showman Liberace after describing him as effeminate. Try as I might, though, and I must have written scores of letters to various publications, I had no luck in that direction, and so I joined a bank. My headmaster, who was highly critical of my leaving school without going on to college, having been unable to persuade me to stay on, wrote a letter of introduction to a contact of his who was the general manager of the Bank of London and South America. I went off to Threadneedle Street in the City of London for an interview and was offered a job. It would entail six months’ training and I would then be posted to Buenos Aires. ‘We’ll never see you,’ said my mother on hearing about it. So I joined a bank a little closer to home, in Brighton. I hated every waking minute of it.

I had had a couple of dates with girls at this time. The thrill of simply holding hands in the cinema was almost overwhelming. I had got into a little trouble on one trip to Ireland when I had taken a beautiful local girl from Ennis to the pictures. Her name was Maura Gorman, and I had given her a kiss in the back row. I had been spotted and was marched off to see my Uncle Frank, who took me to one side: ‘We don’t do that sort of thing in public,’ he said. I was mortified, feeling that I’d let the family down. Mind you, Maura had enjoyed it as much as I had.

Then, back in Brighton, I had bumped into Susan, who with her blonde hair and good looks was making the social side of life very bearable indeed. Sue was still at the girls’ grammar school and looked good even in her navy blazer. Her parents were nice people but a bit suspicious of this boy from the council estate. Over the next ten years, they would get to know me pretty well.

2
NOT A COMPLETE BANKER

After a couple of years in banking, and with Part 1 of the Institute of Bankers’ exams passed in double-quick time, I decided I couldn’t stand the job any longer and left. For a couple of months I worked as a trainee salesman, which involved me moving away from Brighton and staying in digs.

My landlady, some ten years my senior, took a liking to me and was quite keen to introduce me to the comforts of her bedroom. Had her husband, who was a man mountain, returned home from his job (which involved unsocial hours), I would not now be alive to write about it; but I managed to stay pure despite her constant provocation, which did occasionally lead to a bit of slap and tickle, but nothing more.

Both the landlady and the job were very temporary experiences and I soon returned to Brighton to seek further employment and begin doing a little freelance writing. This clearly would not pay many bills and so I took another temporary job driving a fish delivery van. That lasted a few weeks in the summer. It involved getting up at 5 a.m. to pick up the ‘locally caught’ produce (which had come down from Hull or Grimsby) at the railway station, take it to the shop for filleting, and then off to deliver it to the local hotels and other outlets. The head chef of one hotel would take the baskets of fish, returning them empty to me, save for the fillet steak and a mountain of groceries that I would then deliver to his girlfriend’s flat. There would be a steak in it for me as payment. This was plainly dishonest, but at the time I convinced myself that the chef was doing the stealing. I was merely the ‘mule’.

Soon I had to get a proper job again and found myself in the world of insurance, and started to climb the career ladder. It wasn’t very stimulating but it would give me some sort of future if that was the way my life was going to pan out.

Then I got married to Sue and off we went in her mother’s coffee-coloured Triumph Herald convertible to the Isle of Wight on honeymoon. We were young, I was 23, Sue not yet 22, but we had already known each other for five or six years.

Having enjoyed good health since my early brush with illness as a small boy, I was now to experience another nasty shock.

I had suffered a pretty severe headache one day while at the Farnborough Air Show and, like a fool, had taken a couple of aspirin washed down with a pint of lager. I felt decidedly unwell on the journey home and that night woke and was sick. Frighteningly, I was vomiting blood. Sue called the doctor, who inspected the residue of my insides and decided it was hospital for me.

On arriving at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, I was wheeled into the reception area, where I was asked for my date of birth, next of kin, etc. Then, the woman instructed the ambulance men: ‘He’s for death list.’ So that was it. Twenty-three years of age and it was all over. I hadn’t had a life. I had achieved nothing. I gripped Sue’s hand and a tear slid down my face. All I could think of to say to her was ‘sorry’.

And so I was taken to Defflis Ward, named after a former mayor of the town. Thankfully they eventually changed it; apparently I was not the only one who, over the years, thought they were on the way out instead of up to the third floor.

I was diagnosed with a slight scarring of the duodenum, an indication that I had had an ulcer at some time. But I soon recovered and was back on my feet, but banned from ever taking aspirin again.

It was the middle of the Sixties. I was in my early twenties with a wife, a mortgage and a career in insurance. I had passed the examinations of the professional body, which made up some way for my not going to university. I had reached the heady heights of inspector, the company had supplied me with a car – a shining new pale green Ford Anglia – and I spent my days racing around Sussex, calling on insurance brokers, assessing risks of burglary or fire or anything else insurable and, in the main, was having a pretty good time of it. Up till now the Sixties had hardly swung for me, but I was on a fast track to promotion to branch manager, and would probably be one by the time I hit thirty. I would have earned a reasonable salary for the rest of my life

But was I happy? Hell, no. I constantly felt there was more to life. More to me. I felt that I had made some wrong decisions and was now paying for them. It looked as though I would be stuck in this world of business for the next thirty-five years – fine for some, but not for me. My private life was pretty good, and I had an excellent group of friends; but there was a burning dissatisfaction within me.

But my thoughts about the future, and how I might escape from my routine, slipped way down my list of priorities one day in early 1968. My mother, who had scarcely had a day’s illness in her life, suddenly suffered a brain haemorrhage and was rushed to hospital, where she was operated on. The prognosis was not good. If she made any recovery at all, she would almost certainly have been severely disabled. Day after day for a month, my Dad and I, often with my wife Susan, journeyed the thirty or so miles there and back to visit her in hospital. Day after day we would imagine improvements in her condition: ‘I’m sure I saw a flicker of a smile’ – ‘I thought she moved her fingers ever so slightly’. We were trying desperately to give each other some comfort, some hope. After a month my darling mother passed away at the tragically early age of fifty-four. She had been my rock. I loved her very dearly. She was a sensible, funny and charming woman. A looker in her day who rode motorcycles when young and was the life and soul of any party. And dance! How she loved to dance, twirling round the floor on a fine pair of legs. She was the youngest of eight children, but the first to die apart from a brother who had suffered from tuberculosis before the War. Her other brothers and sisters lived on to healthy old age. I and my father were distraught. I had never seen my Dad cry before. We wept together and could find no consolation. I thought my life had come to an end too. I had recently discovered W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Funeral Blues’, made more famous years later in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. At the time, I certainly felt as though the clocks had all been stopped. Nothing else would worry me ever again. Nothing could be this bad. We hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye. I worried that she was going into the unknown without our support. She would be scared. I wouldn’t, at that stage, have minded paving the way for her.

As the weeks went by, I was even surer that security didn’t matter a tinker’s cuss. I needed to grab life by the throat and wring some meaning out of it. I felt I could write something, but what? I had been unable to get my break into journalism, and as time went by the chances were becoming slimmer. Why would any paper take on someone who worked in insurance? I had offered the odd article to the local papers and to football magazines. Sport was my interest, so I contacted a few sportsmen and asked if I could write a profile on them, without being able to guarantee that the article would ever see the light of day.

Amazingly, several agreed. Even more amazingly, one or two were published.

Seeing my by-line in print had given me a thrill and I began to imagine that sooner or later I would get my break.

And it came, not from print journalism, but from radio.

In those days, to get into the BBC was well-nigh impossible, unless you had either exemplary qualifications or connections. I had neither and it hadn’t even occurred to me to try to breach the citadel at Broadcasting House.

But then I saw a notice in the local paper that the BBC was opening up local stations around the country and that one of the first would be Radio Brighton. It registered with me and a little later, when the station was under way, they began advertising for people who might have an interest in broadcasting to get in touch. I didn’t know anything about broadcasting but I rang them up and, to my utter astonishment, I was invited to come and have a look at the station and try my hand, or rather my voice, in front of the microphone.

A gentleman called David Waine, who was probably no older than me but whose face I recognised from regional television, gave me what transpired to be my audition. Years later, David was to become a very senior figure at the BBC but, at this time, he had given up his television job to embark on a new radio adventure.

‘You have a good voice,’ he said. ‘Very fluent.’ He told me that he would get in touch. He knew of my interest in sport.

I now began to think that my dear mother was pulling some strings for me. The feeling was strong. I was gaining some confidence from the thought, or the fantasy, whichever it was, that I was throwing off my shackles of self-doubt, of concern for the future. Not long after, I found myself in the studio on a Saturday afternoon reading football results and other sports news. It was great fun, entirely unpaid.

In no time at all, under the experienced (he had been in the business for weeks) eye of an amiable chap called John Henty, I was presenting the Saturday night sports desk. Soon I was writing a weekly review of the local press, which involved arriving at the studio at 6.30 in the morning; reading through the three local weekly papers and writing, by hand, a three-minute piece to be voiced live just after the 8 a.m. news bulletin. I was amazed that I could do it at all; but I was also apparently making it interesting and funny and getting a terrific response. The local newspaper editors began paying attention to it, occasionally complaining if they thought I was being harsh on them. I was using their copy for flights of fancy into areas that had little to do with the content in their papers. In short, I was using them as an excuse to write a weekly radio essay. Then I branched into comedy – or at least I and my writing partners thought it was comedy.

Together with Ivan Howlett, still a radio broadcaster, the aforementioned John Henty, Peter Vincent (who went on to be a top comedy writer for The Two Ronnies and others), and a girl singer called Amaryllis, I began putting together and performing in a Sunday half-hour show called How Lunchtime It Is – there was a TV series called How Late It Is that had prompted the idea for the title.

I could do passable imitations of the two leading politicians of the time, Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. Actually they were impersonations of Mike Yarwood doing Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, and ‘they’ appeared in every show. Incidentally, years later I was invited to lunch at Edward Heath’s majestic home in Salisbury. On entering, Ted wondered if I ‘could abide champagne’ – a curious way of posing the question, but I answered ‘Yes, and plenty of it.’ I asked him who had been the most impressive leader he had met down the years. Unhesitatingly, he said, ‘Mao-Tse-Tung.’ ‘But he was a mass murderer,’ I ventured. ‘You’re typically falling into the trap of misunderstanding his position,’ said Ted, an acknowledged Sinophile.

I loved being involved in How Lunchtime It Is. We went into the studio on Sunday mornings to record our offerings, having roped our friends in to be the audience. They laughed more at our attempts at being satirists than at the quality of the content, but these were some of the happiest days of my life. I was becoming fulfilled at last. I was a broadcaster. Unpaid, but I was a broadcaster. My hobby was now interfering with my career.

So, naturally enough, I gave up my career.

Sue and I had rented a small terraced house owned by her father, a local funeral director. He knew I was not overly enthusiastic about my job in insurance and one day he had sat me down and offered me a junior partnership in his business. I think he was mostly thinking about his daughter’s future quality of life, but it was a very generous offer to make. But ‘Des the Funeral Director’ was never going to be, and I politely refused, with much gratitude for his consideration.

Soon after this, I bought my first house for £3,750 (the vast majority of it paid for by mortgage). For that I got a four-bedroom Victorian terraced property with a garden in an old but decent part of town. My move into insurance had been yet another career change, but it was only postponing the inevitable and the shocking death of my mother made me realise that there was no longer anything left to lose. Her passing spurred me on to leave the conventions of a nine-to-five profession. I had been helped in my decision by a veteran local journalist and friend, Jack Arlidge. ‘Fortune favours the brave, Des,’ he had said to me. And so it seemed that everything was telling me to pursue my dream of becoming a journalist.

I discussed it with Sue. I wanted to give up the security of my job, my company car, my preferential mortgage deal and my pension rights, not to mention my income, for a tilt at the windmill of broadcasting. Sue, good girl that she was, was all for it. ‘Time to have a go,’ she said.

It was a brilliant response, and so I gave in my notice, bought a twelve-year-old Volkswagen Beetle from my new colleague, John Henty, for £140 and turned up each day at my new job at Radio Brighton. I got paid per item in guineas. After a few months, my income had slumped to about a tenth of what it had been. Sue was now paying most of the bills from her job as a librarian.

Soon I was expecting reasonable broadcasting standards of myself and others around me. One day, a colleague, fed up with my criticism of the poor quality of a sports item, turned on me: ‘Who do you bloody well think you are, David Coleman?’ he bellowed. ‘No, but the listeners have a right to expect professionalism from any broadcaster they have tuned in to hear or watch,’ I pompously replied. I was crossed off this chap’s Christmas card list straight away, but I knew I was right. What I could not have envisaged was that one day I would take over from David Coleman as the main presenter of Grandstand, a decision about which he was none too pleased.

In the early Eighties I began sharing the programme with Coleman. His period on the show coincided with most of the major events, like the Five Nations Rugby Championship (as it then was), the Grand National and the FA Cup Final. Then I would take over, allowing him to commentate on the athletics championships, his speciality. I had mentioned once or twice that I wouldn’t mind trying one or two of the major outside broadcast events. I had made no firm requests or stipulations. However, after the 1984 Olympics, it was decided that I should be the number one presenter. Coleman remained the athletics commentator and presented A Question of Sport.

But all that was a long time in the future. For the time being I was happy just simply being in local radio. After a couple of months I had managed to get one or two reports sent up to the network in London and they had been well received. Soon after that, I spotted an advert in the BBC in-house magazine. The sports department in London were seeking ‘Sports News Assistants’. Despite my limited experience, I applied. It would be the last job I ever applied for at the BBC.

3
TAKING THE MIKE

It was one morning in the late autumn of 1969 that I caught the train from Brighton to Victoria Station in London, hopped on the tube to Oxford Circus, and duly presented myself at the reception desk at Broadcasting House as requested. I was excited and nervous. I sensed that a few very important hours lay ahead.

Somebody took me up the three floors to the offices of the radio sports news department, and there I was introduced to a slim dapper man with a thin moustache and slicked-back grey hair. I thought he was pretty old. He was about fifty-eight years of age. He greeted me with a firm handshake and a smile.

‘So you want to come and join the big boys,’ he said. His speech pattern and Scots accent seemed to produce a slight menace in the words as he said them. He was Angus McKay, a legend in BBC Radio. Shortly after the Second World War he had begun a programme called Sports Report, the five o’clock show that is still going today on Radio 5 Live and which is the longest running sports programme in the world. Its familiar signature tune, ‘Out of the Blue’, remains to this day as well. Angus had started with Raymond Glendenning, the most famous sports commentator of his day before television got into its stride, as his presenter, but soon found a young Irishman with a mid-Atlantic style of speech whom he would mould into a star. That young man was Eamonn Andrews, who of course went on to television fame with This is Your Life.

I noticed that Angus worked from an easy chair and in front of him was just a low coffee table. I learned later that he didn’t like desks. ‘If you have a desk, people put bits of paper on it,’ he would say. For Angus, everything was dealt with there and then.

He had heard one or two of my reports from Radio Brighton and apparently thought that my voice was OK and that if he put me through my paces I might make the grade. ‘First though,’ he said, ‘you’re a bit old to join the department [I was just twenty-seven]. We normally catch them younger. I want to make sure you know your sport, so we have worked out a little quiz for you.’

I was put in the hands of his number two, Vincent Duggelby, and asked to fill in the answers to a list of thirty-six sports questions. I got thirty-five right. I must have been a bit of an anorak. Anyway, things went pretty well and I was allowed to apply formally for one of the vacancies as a sports news assistant. The job might involve some broadcasting or production work or writing, or most likely all three. Some weeks went by before I was back at Broadcasting House for a voice test conducted by Bob Burrows, who in due course would take over as boss of the radio sports news department. I passed that test as well, and now came the appointments board. There were four people on the board, but I had figured out that Angus would be making the decisions and was the man to work to. I knew I had hit it off with him because I made him laugh, not the easiest of tasks. Bob Burrows told me later that Angus thought he might make something of me. He told Burrows he had found a new Sports Report presenter. Having been a military man, he had also liked the fact that I was neatly dressed and my shoes were polished. Angus was to change my life.

In a short space of time, I had gone from being an insurance inspector, to a freelance local radio broadcaster, to a member of the staff in national broadcasting at the BBC on a starting salary of £2,030 per annum.

I could not have been happier. Three other hopefuls were appointed with me: Chris Martin-Jenkins, the cricket writer and Test Match Special commentator; Bill Hamilton, who went on to be a television news man; and Dick Scales, who left broadcasting after a few years for jobs with Coca-Cola, Adidas and other businesses connected with sport. Dick and I hit it off straight away. He had a great sense of humour, an eye for the ladies, and was tough as you like – he had spent a few years in the military police before entering journalism. In fact, all of us new boys became good friends. Among those already in the department were Peter Jones, the then presenter of Sports Report and an outstanding football commentator; Bryon Butler, a man with a deep baritone voice and a clever wordsmith; and John Motson, who was younger than all of us.

After my first morning in the department I went off to lunch with Roger McDonald, one of my new colleagues, in the BBC canteen on the top floor at Broadcasting House. After lunch we got separated and I made my way down in the lift back to the office. I duly sat at the desk I thought I had left an hour or so before. After a while a chap came over to me and asked if he could help in any way.

‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m just waiting to see how the afternoon sports desk is put together.’

‘Then perhaps you should go down one more floor,’ he said. ‘That’s where the sports department lives. At the moment you’re in documentary features.’

Wrong floor. Idiot.

After a couple of days I was asked to read the racing results live on air. Although I had done a good amount of far more difficult tasks in local radio, I was actually quite nervous imagining the enormity of the national audience at 6.45 in the evening.

Soon I was writing and presenting the fifteen-minute sports desk on some evenings, or else I was producing the programme, putting the recorded or live pieces together, briefing whoever was the presenter of the day, and getting the timing spot on so as not to trample all over the news at 7 o’clock. I was also occasionally producing the department’s half-hour weekly sports programme for the World Service called Sports Review. I found the voice work much easier than the production and gradually that part of my role fell into the hands of others who were more adept at it.

Just after I joined the department Angus told us that a new slot was to be our responsibility. The Today programme, the early morning current affairs show on Radio 4, was about to introduce a sports section that would go out live twice every morning – it is still part of the programme today. It would entail a reporter from Angus’ department coming in the night before to put the broadcasts together and then present them live the following morning. If you could grab a few hours sleep, a room was provided at the Langham Building, across the road from Broadcasting House.

Angus had selected me to do the very first one. ‘Vitally important you get it right, old son,’ he said. ‘Big audience. Don’t let me down.’

So on Grand National day 1970, the late Jack de Manio linked over to yours truly to look ahead to the nation’s big race.

After my second broadcast of that morning, Angus telephoned me.

‘An outstanding start,’ he said. ‘You have maintained the reputation of my department as top-notch.’ I thought my chest would burst with pride.

A few months later, after another early morning broadcast, Angus phoned me again. ‘I want you in my office in an hour,’ he said. ‘And you’d better have a very good reason for me not to sack you.’

I had transgressed simply by using in one of my pieces a journalist who was on Angus’ ‘black list’. Apparently he had warned me never to use this individual. I had either forgotten or not listened properly, and Angus was fuming with anger that this person should have made his way, at my invitation, on to one of ‘his’ programmes. After wiping the floor with me, he forgave this mortal sin of mine and I continued to be one of his boys. Angus put the fear of God into all of us who worked for him; but he disciplined us, taught us how to be proper broadcasters, and we had the utmost respect for him.

One of the problems with grabbing a few hours’ sleep in the Langham was that you had to remember to wake up. It was the job of the security man to call you at the appropriate time, but not all of them were reliable. One morning there was no call and I woke up at 7.15 – ten minutes before I was due to broadcast. I threw on a shirt and trousers, dashed across the road to Broadcasting House, grabbed my unfinished script from the sports room, and ran down the corridor to the Today studio.

‘Ah, here he comes’, said the presenter. ‘Desmond Lynam with the sports news.’ I could hardly breathe. I read my first line or two, stopped, and tried to catch my breath. ‘What’s the matter?’ enquired the presenter. ‘Well, I’ve just come from the bedroom,’ I replied.

The other problem for some staying at the Langham was the ghost. Eminent broadcasters like the late Ray Moore and James Alexander Gordon would not stay in a certain room there for all the money in the world. The story went that an old actor-manager had thrown himself from the window of this room when the Langham had been a hotel before the war (it has now reverted to being a five-star hotel). I stayed in the said room several times and had no spiritual experiences, but Ray and James were adamant that they had seen the ghost and that it had frightened them out of their wits.

In amongst all of this, in August of that year, my son Patrick was born. My wife Sue had an easy and uneventful pregnancy and had looked her most beautiful during this time. What a year we were having! New career, new baby, it was all going too swimmingly.

After just a few months, and by the time the football season was getting under way again, Angus decided I was ready to have a go at presenting Sports Report. Peter Jones, who wanted to spend more of his time commentating, would be a hard act to follow. He had a wonderful lilting voice, with just a slight trace of his Welshness, and had considerable style on air. Also, his pedigree was light years better than mine. He was a Cambridge graduate, a soccer blue, a fluent linguist in French and Spanish, and hugely literate. Robert Hudson, the Head of Outside Broadcasts and a rather dour traditionalist, was very much against my quick promotion. He felt I did not have the appropriate experience. He was right, but Angus saw my potential and was all for throwing me in at the deep end. Angus won the day and I did a few programmes not too badly, after one of which, Angus told me that I had appeared disingenuous during one interview. I had to look the word up.

Normally in broadcasting, the editor will be in the gallery or booth outside the actual studio. This wouldn’t do for Angus, who insisted on sitting next to his presenter and whispering instructions in his ear, often while the presenter was talking to the nation. Instruction through a talkback system is commonplace in broadcasting and it becomes second nature to react while still speaking, but it was most disconcerting to have Angus’ lips in contact with your earhole, and if you didn’t react immediately to his instruction, for the very valid reason that you couldn’t actually hear it, he would become apoplectic with rage.

Before one such programme, he and I were sitting in the office putting the final touches to the script for the evening show. At the time, a well-known Daily Mail journalist called J. L. (‘Jim’) Manning used to come in to the show on Saturday nights and do his ‘final word’ piece. Jim was quite a contentious individual and his three minutes were worth listening to.

The phone rang and it was for Angus. I obviously only heard his end of the conversation, the abridged version of which went like this.

‘Hello, Amy [Manning’s wife]. Oh no. A heart attack. In the small hours. Intensive care. Our love goes out to you, Amy. We’ll be thinking of Jim. Call you later.’

Then Angus turned to his number two, Bob Burrows. ‘Bob,’ he said, ‘we’ve got a problem. Manning’s fucking let us down.’

A couple of years after I joined the department, a young Alan Parry came for an interview. If he was lucky enough to get the job, Angus asked him, what did he think his ultimate ambition in broadcasting would be? Alan thought for a moment and, probably struggling for a response, said: ‘I suppose, in the long term, I would like to have a go at television.’ There was a long silence and then much sucking in of air and glances round the room. ‘Don’t you think, Alan, that if television was important Mr Burrows [his assistant] and I would be in television?’

That was Angus: a man with little self-doubt and possessing a consummate belief in his standing in the great world of radio. Alan, of course, has gone on to forge a highly successful career in television.

If I wasn’t doing Sports Report, then I usually presented Sports Session, which went out at 6.30 in the evening on Radio 4. Chris Martin-Jenkins sometimes filled this role as well. One evening, I had finished a stint on Angus’ programme and was listening to ‘Jenko’ doing his bit on Sports Session. It was a half-hour show. At about 6.50 I heard him say, ‘That’s all for this week. Good night.’ We couldn’t believe it. There followed about a minute of nothing, then much shuffling of papers, and then came Jenko’s voice again. ‘I’m afraid that wasn’t the end of Sports Session. And now the rugby.’ One producer had got his timings a bit wrong. We were hysterical with laughter and gave the future much-respected cricket correspondent plenty of stick when he appeared in the office later.

A fairly regular guest on Sports Report at the time was Eric Morecambe who was a director of Luton Town Football Club. I interviewed him several times at their Kenilworth Road ground and once at the BBC Television Centre where he and Ernie Wise were in rehearsals for one of their shows. He always gave his time, no matter how busy he was.

On one occasion I was presenting the programme from London and was talking to him ‘down the line’ during one of Luton’s games.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘We’ve got a penalty. Whey hey!’

‘Tell us about it then,’ I said and Eric proceeded to do a perfect commentary on the build up, the spot kick and the celebrations. It’s a much replayed piece of radio history. Eric was such a huge star at the time, I couldn’t believe how down to earth and how kind he was to this unknown radio reporter.

My first really big adventure with BBC Radio came in the summer of 1972, when I learned that I had been selected for the team to cover the Munich Olympic Games.

Peter Jones had gone out to Germany early to do some preview reports and he phoned me in typically upbeat fashion. ‘When you arrive on Thursday, old son,’ he said, ‘call me straight away. I have fixed up two beauties who are going to join us for dinner.’ I was already greatly excited about going to the Games anyway. Now I had an extra incentive. I was of course married at the time, but I thought a little innocent flirtation would not go amiss.

When I arrived I met Jonesy for a drink and was told that the ladies in question would be joining us shortly. A few minutes later I looked up the long staircase adjoining the bar, and one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen was descending in our direction. I nudged Jonesy. ‘Have a look at that,’ I said. ‘Ah, that’s Heidi,’ he said. ‘She’s my partner for the evening.’ Heidi turned out to be the daughter of a baron, twenty-four years of age, and a multi-linguist who would be working as a translator at the Games but who would not have looked out of place in a Miss World competition. Her friend arrived a few minutes later. I used to tell the story afterwards that Jonesy tucked me up and the friend was hideously ugly. In truth she wasn’t a bad-looking girl and we had some fun for a few days before the Games began.

One day we hired a car so that ‘Marguerite’ could show me a little of the Bavarian countryside and its wonderful castles. I had forgotten to bring my driving licence, so the car had to be hired in her name and she had to be seen driving it away. Only then did she inform me that she had passed her driving test just a few weeks before. Result: first big roundabout, a Munich taxi hit our Ford Taunus amidships. Cue much screaming and yelling in a foreign tongue. Our car now had a mighty dent in it but was drivable and I took over, despite having no valid licence or insurance. The rest of the day went without mishap. In fact it turned out to be idyllic.

When Dick Scales arrived at the Games, he spent the first few days in Munich moaning about everything. He didn’t like the place, hated the food and had been given an impossible task, etc. Then we went to the Games village and as we entered, a group of female interpreters approached. ‘I think I may get to like it here after all,’ said Scalesy. He certainly did. He married one of them a year or two later and I was his best man.

The story of the Munich Olympics is well documented. Mary Peters won her marvellous gold medal in what was then the women’s pentathlon. I remember Alan Minter being cheated out of a potential gold medal in the boxing when he was on the receiving end of a dreadful decision in his semi-final; and of course these were the Games of Olga Korbut, who charmed the world with her gymnastics. Then there were the seven swimming gold medals of Mark Spitz. But, most of all, the Munich Games will be remembered for the tragic killing of several members of the Israeli team by terrorists.

On the morning it happened I found myself the reporter on duty. In the course of that day I became a news correspondent, answering the questions of London-based presenters on the Today programme and World at One. Did I think the Black September movement was responsible? I was being asked by William Hardcastle, doyen of radio news presenters. It could have been the Green October movement for all I knew, but I waffled my way through and came to realise very quickly that it was more important to sound fluent than to produce any real facts. To this day I never put too much weight on those incessant two-ways by which television news programmes are mesmerised.

When I returned from the Games I was hauled before the Head of BBC Radio News. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you handled the terrorist story pretty well in Munich. I think you should stop messing about with sport and join the news team as a reporter. In a couple of years we’ll make you a correspondent and you’ll be off round the world covering proper stories.’

‘Like wars?’ I asked.

‘Well, that might be part of it,’ he said.

‘Thank you for the compliment,’ I said. ‘But I’m perfectly happy doing what I’m doing.’

‘I think you’re making a mistake,’ he said. In the ensuing years, not for one moment have I ever thought he was correct.

Twenty-five years later I returned to Munich for a television programme and reported from the very apartment where the tragedy had taken place. It all came back and I shuddered at both the memory and at the rapid passage of time.

I telephoned home fairly regularly from the Games but there was one period lasting about a week when my home phone was not being answered. Whenever I rang, at whatever time of the day, there was no reply. This was worrying. I telephoned my wife’s parents. What was going on, I wondered? I was told that Susan was just taking a little break and that they were looking after Patrick. This was most odd. Why had I not been told about this? When I got home I subsequently learned that Sue had fallen for someone else and was having an affair. I knew the person in question; he was an accountant. I had thought he was a friend. My marriage was over. It had lasted just seven years. Now I would be one of those ‘visiting’ fathers. Heartbreaking.

I had nobody else to blame but myself. I had been so absorbed with my new life and career, Sue and my new baby son had not received the attention they deserved. How many times have you heard of men throwing themselves into careers at a cost to their families?

I was especially guilty in Sue’s case. After Patrick’s birth in 1970, she had suffered a breakdown. It wasn’t just post-natal depression. Sue was seriously ill: for a time she became a completely different personality and had to spend some time in hospital. Baby Patrick was without his mother for the first three months of his life. How I wish that my mother had been alive to look after him. As it was, my mother-in-law did a pretty good job, but it was a desperate time. When Sue recovered, she needed my arms around her and a great deal of loving attention, but I was intrigued with my new job. I was commuting, travelling abroad, working nights from time to time, and enjoying all the social invitations that went with it. Sue had to recover her health and deal with a demanding infant, mostly on her own. It should have been no real surprise that when an affectionate arm was offered, she took it. Nonetheless, it did come as a huge shock, and she made it clear there was no way back. We had met as kids, I had been at the local boys’ grammar school, she at the girls’ equivalent. We had had some good times and she gave me my wonderful son, who remains a delight in my life. No recriminations. Had she not strayed, it is almost certain that I would have done: there were so many temptations.

The most important thing to do now was to make absolutely sure I didn’t lose touch with my son. Of course I had to preplan my visits to him, and for a time it was awkward. I missed seeing him grow up on a day-to-day basis; but as he got older we had marvellous times together and I know that to this day he remembers them as fondly as I do. We ate out together a great deal. Even as a four-year-old he was asking for parmesan cheese with his spaghetti. He had impeccable manners in restaurants and I was often complimented on his behaviour. We played table tennis and we swam.

Brighton was a great place for us to be together. We enjoyed the beach and the funfair and exploring. Like all small children, Patrick would ask those questions that stun adults. ‘Why does the sea stop coming in, Daddy?’ Pause for thought. ‘Ahem, it’s because the land stops going out.’ Four-year-old accepts answer and moves on to jumping over cracks in pavement.

Meanwhile my BBC career was expanding into areas other than sport. I had been popping up on a Radio 2 programme called Late Night Extra, reporting on the day’s sport. I had one close shave on the programme. I had adjourned to the bar after what I had thought to be my day’s work done when, having consumed about four pints of lager, I was asked by a chap called Derek Thompson, now of Channel Four racing fame, if I could stand in for him on Late Night Extra as he felt decidedly ill. Well, I did; but I shouldn’t have done and I slurred my way through the broadcast, much to the amusement of the presenter, David Hamilton.

Normally I did the job responsibly, and I seemed to interact well with whichever presenter was working on the show. Soon I was asked by the music department if I would like to introduce a new programme that would go out just after the seven o’clock news each night, appropriately called After Seven. I would do one night a week, while the likes of Michael Aspel, Michael Parkinson and the late Ray Moore would do other nights. I used to joke on air that I was the only person doing the show that I had never heard of, and soon under the guiding hand and ample bosom of a fearsome lady producer called Angela Bond, I established a new strand to my broadcasting life. It was basically a middle of the road music programme with some features included. I came up with an idea which we called ‘Monday’s Mimic’. Members of the public could win a prize for their impressions of famous figures, but they had to do it live down the telephone. Some were good, the odd professional was clearly ringing in, but we tried to avoid them because the deluded amateurs were hilarious. We had one poor chap whose ‘James Cagney’ and ‘Mae West’ were indistinguishable and we used to fall about in the studio.

In addition, having presented the sportsdesk on the Today programme I was asked if I fancied actually presenting the whole programme. I began doing this on the occasional Saturday by myself and then joined Jack de Manio, John Timpson and later Robert Robinson, as one of the weekday presenters of the show. All the while, I continued with my sports programmes. I was working flat out. Some weeks I was up at three in the morning to present the Today show, did After Seven on the Monday, plus a six-hour sports show on the Saturday. Bear in mind that I was now to all intents and purposes a ‘single’ man again. I was not exactly behaving like a monk, and the candles were being burnt not just at both ends but in the middle too. Eventually I turned down the invitation to renew my agreement with Today and got my life back on a more even keel. But being on the programme taught me a huge lesson about how to work under pressure and write lucidly and concisely in a very limited space of time.

I retain undying admiration for the likes of John Humphrys, who, despite the ungodly hour his day begins, is as sharp as a tack on the current Today programme. He also has to deal constantly with heavyweight issues. In my time, although politics was very much part of the programme, overall it had a lighter feel to it. There was still time for the ‘record egg-laying hen’ type of story.

In fact one morning, when Jack de Manio was still doing the show, he had to conduct an interview with a chap who had bred an unusual type of mouse. The creatures had been brought into the studio in a small cage. Jack, rascal that he was, finished the interview and, as I began the next item, I could see out of the corner of my eye that he was heading towards me, small furry beast in hand. He promptly shoved it up the sleeve of my jacket. As it ran across my shoulder and down my back, I just kept ploughing through my link. Jack later told the listeners what he had done and was amazed I had kept going. In truth I was still a bit raw, and thought that was the thing to do.

While working on Today I had a few dates with a pretty secretary on the show. One evening I arrived at her flat in North London to take her out to the pictures. While I was enjoying one of her liberal gin and tonics, the door bell rang. She peered out of the window and very quickly ushered me into the back garden.

‘Slight problem,’ she said. From the safety of the pitch-black garden, I was able to see her problem. He was one of my occasional co-presenters on Today, famous both then and now, and seemed most put out when he was fairly hastily dealt with and shown the door. I was retrieved from my hiding place and it was explained to me by my date that he was just a friend and he had arrived on this occasion uninvited. Off we went to the cinema and the incident was never mentioned again, although for some time afterwards every time I saw him I was sorely tempted to ask him if he fancied the lady in question.

In my radio days I was sent up to Hampstead one morning to do an interview with Dudley Moore for the Today programme.

I was quite nervous about it. Dudley and Peter Cook were hugely famous at the time and I was a big fan. I had first seen them in their satirical hit ‘Beyond the Fringe’ at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, during their pre-London run.

Dr Jonathan Miller, one of the famous quartet – the fourth of course was Alan Bennett, once told me that the local theatre cognoscenti who came back-stage after a performance were of the opinion that while the show was attractive it had its limitations. Apparently one old, rather camp theatre regular told him ‘whatever you do, don’t even think about taking it to the West End.’ Of course, it had a record-breaking run in London.

By the time I was to interview Dudley, he and Cook had been delighting television audiences with their shows and were at the peak of their popularity.

I arrived at Dudley’s home and he came to the door himself. ‘Welcome,’ he said. For some reason his facial movement as he said the one word, made me laugh. ‘I’ll have to write a sketch around the word “welcome”,’ he said. ‘It obviously works for you.’

I turned on my tape-recorder and Dudley went through a comedy routine for me, interspersed with a few delightful examples of his genius on the grand piano. I ended up with a brilliant interview, which had precious little to do with me. Dudley had just performed.

As I was about to leave, he asked me where I was heading. ‘I’m going back to the West End,’ I said. ‘Back to Broadcasting House.’

‘I’ll give you a lift,’ said Dudley. ‘I’ve got to go down that way myself.’ And so in a few minutes I found myself a passenger in Dudley Moore’s blue Mini, being driven by the star himself.

It was another example of how my life had changed in a few short years. I was mixing with the stars. Well, if not exactly mixing, at least having the opportunity to meet them.

I bumped into Dudley again some ten years later, by which time he had become a hit in Hollywood. He seemed as down to earth and personable as ever but thereafter his life became complicated and ended horribly when he contracted a disease of the nervous system.

Another star I met during those radio days was Fenella Fielding, she of the sultry voice and the fluttering eyelashes who appeared in numerous British comedy films.

Again with my trusty tape-recorder in tow, I had made arrangements to interview Fenella at her flat in Knightsbridge.

When she opened the door, I was astonished to find this glamorous lady attired only in a rather flimsy negligee. ‘Oh darling, you’re a little early. I hadn’t quite finished getting ready,’ she said. My eyes were now popping out of my head. And I was consumed also by the obviously expensive perfume she seemed to have bathed in.

Anyway we settled down to do the interview, Fenella going through her vamp routine, when for some reason I asked her why she had never married. This question touched a nerve and she burst into tears. I found myself trying to console her. ‘Please don’t cry, Miss Fielding,’ I said. ‘Let’s ignore that question and move on.’

She recovered and off I went to Broadcasting House with my interview. Unfortunately, my colleagues got hold of the tape recording before I could edit it myself and the ‘Please don’t cry, Miss Fielding,’ quote proved to be difficult to shake off for some considerable time.

I had a few nice times with a sparkling girl called Pam and then I met Jill, a lovely girl, just twenty-three years of age, but already a nursing sister. She was bright and pretty with a great figure, and she was also a beautiful and considerate lover. So what did I do? I messed her around, took a few other girls out, and eventually lost her. I was having my twenties in my thirties and I had a roving eye. Jill came back to help me in a time of need a couple of years later and is still a wonderful friend, living happily in rural France with her husband.

There were already so many strings to my professional bow when along came another. One of the sports in which I was particularly interested was boxing. I had always been a fight fan and took all the magazines connected with the sport. Before joining the BBC I had been to Henry Cooper’s fights with Muhammad Ali, saw Brian London attempt to take on the great man, and took in a boxing show whenever I could afford it. As a schoolboy I had tried my hand at the sport but found it the greatest laxative known to man. In one bout I got knocked out: nearly half a century later I still dream about it. I’d done it because my Dad had encouraged me to learn to stand up for myself. But it wasn’t for me, though my very brief experiences underlined for me how much courage and dedication are needed to have a successful ring career – or indeed to step into the ring at all. I continue to have great admiration for those who do.

So I began to report on boxing for the radio. One Saturday afternoon my guest on Sports Report was the famous fight promoter Harry Levene. Harry was not an easy man to interview. If you asked him what he considered to be a stupid question he would let you know. But after the broadcast he said to me: ‘You know your boxing. Why don’t you become a commentator? You’ve got a good voice and bigger fools than you have done it.’

I began to think about the possibility and asked if I could take a commentary test. I did reasonably well and when the Commonwealth Games came round in New Zealand in early 1974, I was selected as the boxing commentator. What a trip, and what a challenge … oh, and what a girl I met there.

4
NOT AS DUMB AS I LOOKED

I was off to the other side of the world, to Christchurch, on the South Island of New Zealand, for the 1974 Commonwealth Games. It was to be my first trip outside Europe.

First stop was Hong Kong. What a culture shock, and what a delight. The BBC had managed to do a special deal on flights, which meant we could stay over for a couple of nights to sample the wonders of this extraordinary outpost of the British Empire, as it then was. I was in the company of Jonesy once again, plus Bob Burrows, Dick Scales and a good all-round broadcaster who to this day can be heard commentating on television football, John Helm.

We had a ball, enjoying the food, the sights and the fantastic harbour. I fell in love with the place and have been lucky enough to revisit it several times down the years. Then it was on to Australia, where we were due to make just a refuelling stop. As it turned out we were there for a little longer than planned.

On the flight I had been sitting next to Dick, who, despite his physical toughness, was a very nervous air passenger. I had been having a little fun at his expense, for instance when the note of the engines changed. Then, as we were slowly taxiing to begin take-off, I looked out of the window and saw the wing-tip of our aircraft hit the wing-tip of another plane. The bit of our wing came off. Oddly, there was no great crash or noise inside the aircraft.

‘Scalesy,’ I said, ‘a bit of our bloody wing has just fallen off.’ At this point Dick had had enough of me.

He grabbed me round the throat.

‘Lynam,’ he said. ‘If you don’t stop taking the piss, I’m going to clock you one.’

But I wasn’t fooling around this time. The plane was now out of service and we were stuck in Brisbane until a replacement aircraft was made available. The incident did nothing to help Dick’s flying phobia.

Christchurch, New Zealand, in the Seventies reminded me of an English town in the early Fifties. Certainly many of the cars were of that vintage. Indeed there were even plenty of people driving around in pre-war British vehicles. Fords and Morrises and Austins of the Thirties were commonplace. It was something to do with a tax penalty the government imposed on imported cars, and so people just kept the old ones going.

I had three roles in Christchurch. Firstly, to present the Saturday editions of the Today programme from there. The first one occurred just a few hours after our arrival, with me full of jet-lag, but I managed to get through it. Michael Aspel was at the London end. Secondly, I had to present some of the Radio 2 sports programmes, and, thirdly, I was the boxing commentator, not just for the UK but also for the BBC’s World Service. I found myself mugging up on boxers from Uganda, Kenya, in fact from all corners of the Commonwealth. I loved every minute of it, and covered as many as fifteen bouts in a day. It was invaluable experience for what was to come.

During our first evening in Christchurch, I’d met a beautiful girl, one of the hotel receptionists. We started seeing a little of each other, on the few occasions I had time away from the microphone. Apart from her lovely looks and kind nature, this young lady had one other marvellous asset. She was the proud owner of a red Sunbeam Alpine sports car, rare in New Zealand at the time. My popularity with the other guys slumped every time they saw me hop into this red sports car with my gorgeous companion.

We got on very well, but of course the few weeks we were together flashed by. I was sorry to leave both New Zealand and my new friend. Of course I told her that, while it was unlikely that I would be returning to New Zealand in the near future, if she ever came to Europe I would be delighted to see her again. Our parting was emotional, and I thought that, in other circumstances, the relationship might have developed into something more meaningful.

While in New Zealand we had a chance to sample the marvellous beaches. One morning we went swimming and John Helm pointed to a lookout tower with a lifeguard perched on top. ‘He’s very high up,’ remarked John. ‘That’s so he can see the sharks,’ I said. Helmy left the water, never to return for the rest of our trip.

We came back from New Zealand via the West Coast of America and spent a couple of days in San Francisco, where I met up with an old school friend of mine, Charles Trinder, who had emigrated to the States.

A month or so after returning home, there was a call for me one morning in Broadcasting House. ‘Hi, Dis. It’s me,’ said the voice from the other end. Unmistakable New Zealand accent. ‘Wow. This is a good line,’ I said to my Christchurch companion. ‘I’m downstairs in reception,’ she said. Shona had set out, as so many New Zealanders do, on her European tour. She had just decided to make it a little earlier than planned. Like about two years.

We saw each other a couple of times, but I think we both decided, without saying anything, that perhaps our blissful short relationship had its beginning and end in Christchurch. Off she went to see Paris and Rome and I never saw or heard from her again. I hope she has had a wonderful life.

It was the start of a busy year. I did my first commentary on a world title fight as John Conteh beat an Argentine boxer, Jorge Ahumada, to become the World light-heavyweight champion at Wembley; then I was off to Kinshasa in Zaire to cover the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ – George Foreman, defending the World heavyweight title he had taken from Joe Frazier, against the former champ, the great Muhammad Ali.

I had been fortunate enough to have met Ali when he came to London a year or two earlier and he did a marvellous interview for me. Now I found myself in the company of Ali once again in a bungalow provided by President Mobutu, whose government had put up much of the money to bring this extraordinary sporting extravaganza to the heart of Africa. Also there were two or three British boxing writers. Ali was explaining to us how he was going to beat Foreman. None of us believed a word of it. Foreman was hot favourite, a colossus in the ring and one of the hardest-punching heavyweights of all time. I was sitting next to Ali while he was going through his routine because I had my trusty tape-recorder under his nose. Close to my nose was the Ali left fist as he explained how he was going to win the fight with his jab. He kept thrusting it towards my face and at first I flinched a few times. Then I thought, if Ali actually misjudges and makes my nose bleed, what a scoop that would be. So steadfastly I resolved not to move an inch backwards as he continued his tirade. In fact I edged forward ever so slightly. When he finished, he gave me that old Ali sideways glance and that big smile. ‘You’re not as dumb as you look,’ he said. I was hugely complimented. Of course Ali’s timing and judgement was so impeccable, the chances of him actually connecting with my hooter had been extremely slim.

He went on to shock the world by regaining the heavyweight crown, hardly throwing a jab in the process. With extraordinary courage and durability he allowed Foreman to punch himself out, and then went in for the kill.

Recently I spent some time with Big George in London, when he did a splendid interview with me for BBC Radio 5 Live. Just before Ali knocked him out all those years ago, he had whispered in George’s ear, ‘Awful bad time to get tired, isn’t it George?’

Another of the former World heavyweight boxing champions I met was Floyd Patterson. A BBC producer, John Graham, had come up with the idea of a series of programmes on the history of boxing in the Olympic Games. Patterson had won the gold medal in the middleweight division at the 1952 Games in Helsinki, Finland. He had been involved in just twenty-two bouts before being selected for the American Olympic team.

He turned professional straight after his success and campaigned as a heavyweight, one of the smallest of modern times. He became World heavyweight champion at just twenty-one years of age, then lost the title to Ingemar Johannson of Sweden before becoming the first man to regain it when he avenged the defeat.

So John and I found ourselves flying to a little airport in upper New York State to meet the man, now in his early sixties. There was a thin layer of snow on the ground as we drove to the small town of New Paltz and as we approached the Patterson household, there was the old champion himself, waving to us from his front garden.

Patterson was Chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission and at the time was a wonderful advert for the sport of boxing. Despite a gruelling career which involved two meetings with the fearsome Sonny Liston, Floyd looked at least ten years younger than his age. We filmed him shadow boxing and hitting the heavy bag which he did as a routine every day of his life in his own gymnasium. He still had rhythm and timing and looked spritely but there was an air of sadness about the man. For many great sportsmen, life after the competitive years goes cold. In his mind, Floyd was ‘boxing on’ because everything since paled in comparison.

But at least Patterson had retained a little wealth and was living in some style.

Jimmy Ellis, a contemporary of Muhammad Ali, having begun his boxing in Louisville, Kentucky alongside his young friend, the then Cassius Clay, was not so lucky.

Ellis, a wonderful ring craftsman, had held a version of the heavyweight crown too, but when I went to see him, still living in Louisville, he was wearing the green overalls of a worker in the city’s Parks Department. Ellis had also lost the sight of one eye, from an old ring injury. Wealth had passed him by. Did he have any regrets? Not a bit of it. If he had his youth, he would do it all over again, he told me.

My time as the BBC Radio boxing commentator lasted nearly twenty years and overlapped with my television work. It gave me some great times and I made many friends; but one of the saddest days I ever had while I was covering boxing came in 1980 when, along with a BBC Television producer, Elaine Rose, I attended the funeral in Wales of Johnny Owen.

Johnny was known as the ‘Merthyr Matchstick’ and, together with Elaine, I had been to Merthyr some weeks before to film a television feature on him. He was a painfully shy young man who, despite his slender frame, expressed himself best in the boxing ring. And he was good. Our feature was to preview his challenge to Lupe Pintor for the World bantamweight title in Mexico. Tragically, Owen had been injured in the contest and seven weeks later died from those injuries.

I remember the entire population of Merthyr lining the hills of the town as the funeral cortège passed by. On that day some of the toughest men of British boxing cried their eyes out as they paid homage to a brave young boy whose great ambition had cost him his life.

During my time in boxing, I covered around forty world titles and numerous British and European championship fights. For most of them, the legendary Henry Cooper was my ringside summariser. No finer man to have with you and after a nervy beginning, he became a master at filling the minute between each round with his pearls of boxing wisdom. Once in a while Henry would find himself up a verbal cul-de-sac but always extricated himself. ‘’E’s as big as a brick . . . [pause] . . . building.’

Once, when talking about the British heavyweight Richard Dunn, Henry was praising him after one round when he said: ‘He knew what he had to do and in that round Dunn . . . done it.’ Strange syntax. Wonderful man.

I had met Henry several years before we became ringside colleagues. He used to come into Sports Report on the Saturday before his big fights, along with his manager, Jim Wicks. They considered coming into the programme as a lucky omen. Jim always used to talk in the first person plural. ‘We landed a great punch’; ‘He made our nose bleed’, etc. He spoke as though he was actually in the ring with Henry, which he certainly was in spirit. He protected Cooper too. For example, he would never agree to Henry’s fighting Sonny Liston, who had been considered unbeatable until Muhammad Ali (or Cassius Clay, as he was at the time) shocked him and the world.

Henry did meet Floyd Patterson and I think it was after that contest, in which Henry had been stopped, that he was driving home to south-east London with Wicks and his brother George in the car when he made a slight misjudgement at a traffic light that caused an old boy to stumble off his bike. Henry wound down the window to apologise when the elderly cockney threw him a punch to the face. ‘I’d have you out the car except there are three of you,’ said his elderly aggressor. Two defeats in the one night for ‘our ’Enery’.

After the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ I was off to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to see Britain’s Joe Bugner have a tilt at Muhammad Ali’s crown. I was there for two weeks, sending back interviews with the fighters. Ali was always readily available to pronounce in front of a BBC mike. I even got him to record the opening of Sports Report, and Bugner’s wily manager Andy Smith would always talk, even if Bugner himself was sometimes reluctant to do so. Or I would simply do a straight report down the line on the condition and mood of the fighters and their associates. I did one piece in which I had worked out how many hangers-on there were in the Ali camp. It turned out he, or the promotion, were paying the air tickets and hotel bills for about fifty people, forty-five of whom he could have done without.

My producer in London was Dick Scales, who always called everybody ‘son’. Each day I would go to the Malaysian Broadcasting Centre to send my contribution down the line. Scales would address me from the other end in his usual fashion. After a few days, the female Chinese sound assistant who was helping me remarked how nice it was for me to be working with ‘honourable father’ in London. It suddenly dawned on me what she was talking about. I didn’t try to explain.

This was the life. There were at least a couple of hours each day spent by the pool, and then in the evenings, usually in the company of members of the British boxing writers, it was out to sample a little of the night life of Kuala Lumpur. One evening we were enjoying a few drinks when a group of very glamorous ladies asked to join us. We were very happy for them to do so. After a while we realised that these were no ladies; they looked the part, but they were in fact what they call in the Far East ‘lady-boys’ – and they were looking for business. We enjoyed their company and they stung us for some very expensive drinks, but in the time-honoured way of British journalists in such situations, we made our excuses and left.

I made no excuses when I bumped into an extremely attractive female photographer who was covering the build-up to the fight for a Malaysian magazine. I took her out a couple of times and then she invited me to have dinner at her parents’ home. This was indeed an honour. On the evening in question, I took a taxi from my hotel, the directions to the lady’s family home scribbled on a piece of paper. The taxi driver smiled at me rather strangely, I thought, and then hurtled us about ten miles out of the city until we were finally driving up an unmade track. I had visions of being on the end of a scam. Any minute now, I thought, out from this jungle will come a couple of heavies, and I’ll become the story.

Oh me of little faith. Eventually the cab pulled into a clearing and there, waiting for me on the balcony of this neat timber bungalow, was my friend and her parents all decked out in their finery. I had a magical evening and got the distinct impression I was being looked over as potential marriage material. For some months afterwards I was in regular air-mail correspondence with Kuala Lumpur.

The fight itself lasted the full fifteen rounds, but Bugner was never likely to win it. Later, back at the hotel, he was found doing laps of the swimming pool. Ali, despite winning clearly, had gone to hospital with exhaustion, an indication of their respective approaches to the toughest game of all.

Just three months later, Ali was boxing in the Far East again, this time meeting Joe Frazier in the ‘Thriller in Manila’, perhaps the greatest heavyweight fight of all time, in which both of them experienced ‘near-death’.

Later in the year I found myself in a bull ring in Mexico City watching the British welterweight John H. Stracey create a huge upset by beating the great Mexican José Napoles to become world champion. It was a rarity: a British fighter winning a world crown abroad. On the night, the preliminary bouts had all ended early and the Mexican promotion wanted to get on with the main attraction. Our air time was still an hour and a half away. Mickey Duff, part of Stracey’s promotional team, almost had a heart attack persuading the Mexicans to delay things, and very nearly caused a riot in doing so; but he did the job for us. Terry Lawless, Stracey’s manager, came on the show and insisted I do my ‘Michael Caine’ for the listeners (it was a bit of a party piece at the time) before he answered a single question. The listeners must have wondered what on earth I was doing.

Stracey eventually lost the title in London to a fighter from the USA called Carlos Palomino. He had been brought in as a challenger because he was not expected to be too tough an opponent. In fact, a few days before the fight, I asked an American journalist to mark my card about him. ‘How big is he in the States?’ I asked my man. ‘Palomino,’ he said, ‘he’s not even a household name in his own house.’

Phil King was on the trip as my producer. While we were there, I told him that we should enjoy a bit of Mexican culture as well as the hospitality and duly booked for a coach trip to the pyramids. Unfortunately, we had enjoyed a bit of a night out the evening before. At 6 a.m. the phone rang in the room and a voice said, ‘Señor, the coach for the pyramids, she is leaving in ten minutes.’ Phil says my reply down the phone certainly included the word ‘off’. He might be accurate. In those times of budgetary restraint at the BBC, we were sharing a room.

He and I also shared a taxi on our first night in Mexico City. We had asked the concierge for the address of a nightclub where there might be a bit of fun and a few girls. The cab dropped us at this sombre-looking place and when we entered there was no action at all, just a bar with a couple of men sitting at it. Then suddenly a lift came down and out of it stepped a dozen or so girls and paraded in front of us. So much for a nightclub: we were in a brothel. It took some persuasion, and a bit of my Spanish, to get us out of there in one piece.

But, just as in Kuala Lumpur, I did bump into a very sweet girl, and for a short time afterwards I was back in the air-mail business. It’s a wonder I found time to do the broadcasts.

The late Seventies and Eighties usually saw a dozen or so big boxing promotions each year in England, at the Royal Albert Hall or the Wembley Arena. They were either under the banner of Harry Levene or Barrett-Duff Promotions. Mike Barrett was a genial character, Mickey Duff a more rough and ready type who knew boxing inside out and who had once been a professional fighter himself. Levene was an old stager, grumpy as you like, but the man who had planted the thought in my mind about becoming a boxing commentator. They all got on with each other – sometimes. Once when Levene, now in old age, was ill, he telephoned Duff. ‘Mickey,’ he said, ‘I’m leaving it all to you.’ ‘I don’t want your money,’ replied Duff. ‘Not my money, you prick, the promotion,’ came the response. There was not a topline boxer in Britain at the time who didn’t perform on their bills. They worked closely with Terry Lawless, who managed many of the champions of the time, and they had a virtual monopoly; but they put on great shows. In recent years, the sport has been largely lost to the average fight fan, with promotions in small halls and television coverage only on satellite channels. Sitting ringside in close proximity to the weight of the punches, the blood and the sweat constantly underlined the courage of the boxers. Mickey Duff, the old pro himself, with a face to prove it, once told me that if his son ever looked as if he wanted to become a professional boxer, he would be tempted to cut his arm off. He knew precisely how hard a game it was.

I had said on one of our programmes that the first live coverage of a world title fight would be ‘Here, exclusively, on BBC Radio’. This was of course under instruction from the legendary Angus. Arriving back at the office after the show I was told there was a phone call for me. I picked it up and a voice said, ‘Mr Lynam, I have to tell you that you are a liar.’ Who was making this preposterous statement? The voice introduced himself as Jarvis Astaire, of whom I had scarcely heard. It was his rather graceless way of telling me that our forthcoming broadcast would not be exclusive because his company were beaming the fight into a chain of cinemas. Strangely, the conversation ended with us on good terms, despite his inflammatory opening line. Later, on several occasions I hosted his closed-circuit shows. Down the years, whenever I have gone to a major sporting event, almost at any time and anywhere in the world, I have found Jarvis there. Oh, and he’ll definitely have an opinion about it.

Before each big fight I was nearly always allowed in the dressing rooms, where I witnessed the pre-fight nerves of the boxers involved. I began to acquire a useful knack of spotting the winners and losers even before they entered the ring, and I consistently did well when placing a bet on the outcome of fights, in marked contrast to the lack of success I have had over the years when having a flutter on the horses.

I continued to travel round the world when British fighters were involved in major championship bouts abroad. In May 1976 I went to Munich to see another British fighter have a crack at Muhammad Ali. This time it was Richard Dunn, a tough former paratrooper from Yorkshire who had worked his way to the British title after some mediocre years. Dunn was nowhere near world class, but Duff and Barrett had engineered a big pay day and a probable beating for him.

For this fight Richard had acquired an addition to his usual retinue. Now he had a hypnotherapist with him who was boasting that not only would the British fighter enter the ring with absolutely no fear, but that he would actually create one of the all-time great upsets by beating Ali.

At the weigh-in for the fight, there was a near disaster when the ring collapsed with Ali in it. He could have been killed. As it was, he clambered out of the wreckage, unmoved by the untypical German inefficiency, and got on with the formalities.

In the fight, Dunn was indeed fearless and even caught the great man with a few decent punches; but you can’t hypnotise someone to be more talented than they truly are, and the inevitable end came in round five with an Ali knock-out.

After the fight something strange occurred. Dunn, who had always had a stutter, did an absolutely fluent interview with me, speech impediment missing for the first time in his life. A couple of hours later, the old stutter was back. A punch to the jaw is obviously only a temporary cure.

I had travelled to Germany with a heavy heart. Just before I left home, I learned that my father had been diagnosed with colon cancer. A couple of months later he died, after a major operation. This warm, generous and humorous man, full of common sense and decency, would no longer be there to advise me and make me laugh with his wit and wisdom. I was devastated. He had spent his life caring for others but when he needed care, it seemed to me that the doctors showed less concern than they should have done. Despite many requests at the time, the surgeon who operated on my Dad was always ‘too busy’ to give me the benefit of his advice or expertise about my father’s exact condition and I was continually palmed off with his juniors. I bitterly regret that I did not demand his attention more.

I felt alone and in despair. I needed a friend. I telephoned Jill, who had taken a job at a hospital in Holland. Jill had known and liked my father very much; so she came and held my hand and made arrangements, looked after my relatives from Ireland, and got me through. I took a few weeks off work and we spent some lazy days on Brighton beach as I tried to get over my loss. Then, once again, I let her go.

I now immersed myself into work even more and was glad of the boxing trips abroad. And of course, like millions of other people, I was still intrigued by Muhammad Ali. But he was now getting well past his prime. Many people thought he should have retired with his faculties intact after the ‘Thriller in Manila’. Certainly his doctor, Ferdie Pacheco, who had always been in his corner, strongly advised him to do so. By 1978, Ali was still very much active, but his speed of reflexes had deserted him and the wonderful footwork was a thing of the past. Now he was defending his title against Leon Spinks, a blown-up light heavyweight whom I had seen win the Olympic gold medal two years before in Montreal, the very title that Ali had won sixteen years earlier.

The fight was taking place in Las Vegas and, as usual, I got there about a week before to cover the build-up. On the day I arrived, my producer Phil King and I were having a bit of a disaster. Not only had the airline managed to send our luggage somewhere else, including all my pre-fight preparation, but the hotel in which we were supposed to be staying had no record of the booking. We were standing in the foyer bagless and roomless, and wondering what our next move was going to be, when the receptionist called my name. ‘Ah, a room,’ I thought. On the contrary, she just had a telephone call for me, on the other end of which was a BBC producer in London. ‘Des,’ he said, ‘I’ve been trying to find you for ages. You’re on live in thirty seconds.’ On came the familiar voice of Tony Lewis, the Sport on Four presenter. ‘Joining me now live from Las Vegas where he’s been watching Ali train is Des Lynam. How is Ali looking, Des?’ There are lies, damned lies, and reports from correspondents in difficult situations.

Eventually we got our hotel sorted out but now we had another problem. With his usual flair for publicity, Ali had a new gimmick. He reckoned that he had been talking too much and was going round with sticking plaster over his mouth. Well, this was jolly fun for the film and television crews and the newspapers, who would all have their pictures of the now wordless Ali; but for this radio commentator it was a total nuisance. Eventually, I managed to persuade him to remove the plaster for a radio interview and he made a big play of ripping it off, so that the microphone could pick up the sound. He always knew precisely what the media needed from him in any given situation.

Then the unthinkable happened. Ali fought his most lethargic contest to date and was on the losing end of a points decision over fifteen rounds. The new heavyweight champion of the world was Leon Spinks, who had only a few professional fights to his credit. Extraordinarily, his brother Michael, who also won an Olympic gold medal in Montreal, at middleweight, went on to win a version of the heavyweight title some years later too.

I always loved going to America for big fight occasions. I felt perfectly at home in the States. All those American movies of my boyhood had set the stage perfectly for me. The first time I went to New York, it seemed so familiar, as though I had been there all my life.

On that first trip there, I came out of my hotel and hailed one of the famous yellow cabs. ‘I wonder if it would be possible to take me to the BBC offices on Fifth Avenue,’ I said to the driver. ‘What is possibility, you want to go there, get in the cab,’ he replied. It taught me an early lesson to cut out the P. G. Wodehouse stuff.

5
A FACE FOR RADIO?

I had been broadcasting on national radio for less than three years when I got a call from someone in BBC Television inviting me to stand in for Frank Bough for four weeks, presenting the Sunday cricket on BBC 2. I explained that cricket was not a special interest of mine in a broadcasting sense. Although I had loved to play the game as a boy, I did not keep up to date with the details of the game in the way I did with many other sports. I was certainly not an expert.

I was told that the job would be simply to ‘top and tail’ the broadcasts and read the scores from other games. It seemed a simple enough task and I agreed to do it. It turned out to be pretty much of a disaster. It rained at all the matches I attended and I was a shuffling nervous wreck as I tried to get the words out to camera. I felt totally ill at ease.

The late, great John Arlott was involved in some of the broadcasts, and it has to be said that he was not overly welcoming. I didn’t particularly blame him. He was hugely famous; I was a raw broadcasting newcomer in comparison. Not for me this television lark, I thought, and I scuttled back to the safety of my radio microphone and ventured nowhere near a television camera again for several years. I had actually received a nice letter from the producer, Bill Taylor, who thanked me for my efforts and thought I managed extremely well. I think he was just being kind.

As time went by, though, people in the business kept telling me I should have another go at television. I was happy doing Sports Report, and my boxing commentaries: by now I had covered the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ in Zaire, the Olympic Games in Munich and the Commonwealth Games in New Zealand; presented the Today programme; and had my own Radio 2 weekly music show, After Seven. I was a busy and successful radio broadcaster. Nonetheless, other people’s ambitions for me were beginning to sway me towards the possibility of doing television. I had put the cricket disasters to the back of my mind by now and had completed a short series of television quiz shows for BBC Northern Ireland. One day I found myself applying for a job with Southern Television (a forerunner to Meridian) to be their sports reporter. I duly sped off to their studios in Southampton, where I was interviewed and given an audition. A few days later I was notified that the job was mine. I would give three months’ notice to the BBC and off I would go to become a regional TV ‘face’.

I went to see Cliff Morgan, the legendary former Welsh rugby union star, who by this time had enjoyed a long career at the BBC and was the Head of BBC Radio Sport and Outside Broadcasts.

‘Cliff,’ I said, ‘I have decided to take the plunge towards television and I think that working on a regional basis would give me the appropriate lower profile in which to learn something about the craft. Then I will find out if I could ever do the business at a national level, hopefully with the BBC. It’s a gamble, but it’s one I have decided to take.’ I must have sounded a pretentious little twit.

‘Lynam,’ he said, ‘you haven’t got the sense you were born with. Here you are making a name for yourself in radio. You’re having brilliant experience covering all the big events. You’ll end up reporting Bournemouth and bloody Boscombe Athletic. I’ll tell you when it’s time for you to make your television move and it’ll be national television, not piddling about on the Isle of Wight.’ Cliff was not being disparaging about those charming areas of the South Coast; he was merely using his graphic language to dissuade me from my intentions.

He was a very persuasive boss, was Cliff, as well as being one of the major influences in my broadcasting life. He remains a dear friend and I am proud and privileged to have known him. Ironically, he now lives on the Isle of Wight, where, sadly, he has not been enjoying the best of health.

The outcome of our conversation was that I telephoned Southern Television and told them I wasn’t taking the job. They were not best pleased with me. It would be another twenty-three years before I did make my move to ITV.

Some time later, Cliff, who had moved back to television, fixed me up with the chance to present two days’ racing at the Grand National meeting, on the Thursday and Friday before the big day itself. Once again I felt less than comfortable. Nowadays I envy those young presenters on satellite television who get their break reading the sports news off an autocue in front of a minimal audience. At least they have the time to get used to a TV camera up their snout. I was out in the wind and rain of Aintree, notes blowing all over the place, desperately trying to remember where I was, who I was, and what the hell I was doing there. By the Friday night I had convinced myself that live television was not for me, and was tempted to write to Southern Television to tell them what a lucky escape they had had. Once again, though, I received a very kind note, this time from the Head of BBC Television Sport, Alan Hart. He thanked me for making what he thought had been ‘a first-class contribution to the programmes’ and wrote that it was the opinion of everyone in his department, not just his. He also mentioned that if I felt disposed to appear on the box again, I should ring him and arrange lunch. I didn’t, and I didn’t. I would not in my wildest dreams have thought then that I would have ended up presenting the Grand National broadcast, one of the most prestigious and difficult events that BBC Television covers, for fifteen years running.

I didn’t call Alan but amazingly enough later in that year, 1977, he called me. He said he had been discussing me with Cliff and that he and I should meet, which we did at the Chelsea home of the racing commentator Julian Wilson. Over lunch, Alan spelled out that he thought – despite my fears and lack of confidence – that my future lay in television and that, once I really got the hang of it, the future could be rosy. I didn’t believe a word he was saying, but a part of me wanted him to be right. I actually thought a bit of fame might not go amiss.

Eventually Alan made me an offer. It was for a three-year contract with BBC Television at nearly twice my then salary of just short of £7,000. That was the part of the deal that encouraged me to move. I thought, I’ll have one more go. I can always go back to radio. I had to resign my comfortable staff job and now, apparently, I needed someone called an ‘agent’.

An agent. I had never needed one before. I had simply taken the salary offered me by the BBC and any increases they had felt like giving me in the eight or so years I had been a radio broadcaster. I had started on just over £2,000 a year at the end of 1969, and by 1977 I was earning the princely sum of close to £7,000 a year. I had been totally content with this compensation. I had a pleasant place to live, usually a nice sports car, and when I wanted to eat out or buy my friends a drink I could afford to do so. Money hadn’t really entered the equation. I could have still been in the insurance business. I was mostly thanking my lucky stars, David Waine and Angus McKay, for changing my life.

But now the BBC wanted to double my money – unimaginable riches. So I took the plunge and decided to have a real go at television. I went with the blessing of Bob Burrows, an old Angus hand, who had taken over as the boss of radio sport, with Cliff moving back to be Head of Outside Broadcasts at Television. He promised me that, if it didn’t work out, I could return to the fold, and anyway he wanted me to continue as the radio boxing commentator, which I did for many years, until the early Nineties.

But an agent. Why did I need an agent? Cliff explained that now I was a potential contractee, it would be necessary to renegotiate my deal from time to time and that it would be much better to have an intermediary involved. They need have no shame in making any demands and, at the same time, the BBC could be honest and direct about the broadcaster’s talents or deficiencies without being personal or hurtful.

I didn’t know any agents, so Cliff recommended the most powerful one around, a gentleman called Bagenal Harvey. Bagenal’s first client had been the outstanding English cricketer of his day, Denis Compton, who was also an Arsenal and England footballer. Denis had not only been cavalier with his wonderful skills but had been much the same with his business opportunities. Bagenal had found that Denis had a pile of unanswered letters, which contained various lucrative offers for product endorsements. Bagenal asked if he could deal with them and take a cut. That’s how Denis became the first ‘Brylcreem boy’ and how Bagenal Harvey started in the agency business. By now, though, he had numerous clients, many in broadcasting, including the two big hitters in television sports presentation at the time, David Coleman and Frank Bough. It occurred to me that I might be better off with an agent who was not representing the men in the jobs I aspired to, but I went to see Bagenal on Cliff’s recommendation.

The meeting did not go well. I thought Bagenal Harvey was interviewing me in the manner that he might adopt when hiring an office boy. ‘Mr Harvey,’ I interjected, I suppose rather cockily in retrospect. ‘I have not come here to be interviewed for a job. I have the job. I have come here to decide whether or not I want to hire you to work for me.’ The meeting came to a fairly swift end. Later, I got a call from Cliff. ‘What have you done to Bagenal Harvey? He’s not very happy with you and he’s a dangerous enemy.’ I explained my position and I think secretly Cliff admired me for my stance.

But I still needed an agent, and so I rang my old friend John Motson, who had made a highly successful transition from radio to television a few years earlier. He was using as his agent a chap who was entirely new to the business, a chartered accountant by profession called John Hockey. I went to see John and we formed a pretty good partnership for the next thirteen years.

But now, what was my role to be in television? Coleman, Bough and Harry Carpenter were filling the main presentational roles, and there were people like David Vine and Tony Gubba, more than capable broadcasters, backing them up. Firstly, I took over a slot called Sportswide, a fifteen-minute programme tacked on the back of the early evening news and magazine programme, Nationwide. Frank Bough, busy man as he was in those days, was also doing the main show, as was Sue Lawley.

It was fairly seat of the pants stuff. My seat was usually vacated by Frank or Sue, or one of the other Nationwide presenters, a few seconds before I began my piece. The same applied to my producer and director, who almost had to fight their way into position in the gallery.

I had a couple of early disasters. We used autocue for the programme, unless we were at an outside broadcast, and the system in those pre-computer days was pretty basic. One was actually reading from a roll of paper rather like a narrow toilet roll; sometimes it became detached and one had to adjust quickly to the script on one’s lap and/or hope you could remember the lines. On one occasion the operator had typed the same paragraph twice. I hadn’t had a chance to spot it before going on air and was halfway through repeating myself, word for word, when I had the presence of mind to say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m repeating myself’ and got away with it.

Sometimes we would record part of the slot and I would link in and out of it ‘live’. The recorded insert would include me in vision. On one occasion the make-up girl, seeing that my hair was too long before the live part of the programme, suggested ‘tidying up my ends’. Like a fool I let her do it, and she went a bit over the top. The viewer at home saw me with short hair, then long hair, then short hair again, all in the same broadcast.

On another occasion somebody stopped the videotape machine for the recorded section of me in vision and the director cut back to me live. The viewer must have thought I’d had a stroke and then recovered. It was all great experience for bigger and, in a way, easier things to come.

Since my move from radio, I had also been doing a little stand-in presentation on Grandstand, as well as helping out when the first London Marathon took place in 1981. My role would be to run back and forth over Tower Bridge and interview some of the slower runners ‘on the hoof’.

Of course it was the beginning of a fabulous event, the dream of Chris Brasher and John Disley, which has caught the public’s imagination so dramatically. Now everybody could become a marathon runner, not just those supermen we watched in awe at the Olympic Games. On the day, I ran across the bridge and back maybe thirty times. I might as well have run in the event itself and bitterly regret that I didn’t give it a go when my fitness was rather better than it is now.

Another year I was doing interviews with the finishers and posed one of the dumbest questions of all time. I asked Grete Waitz, the great Norwegian athlete, if she had been pleased with her time: she had just broken the world’s best time for the event, but I didn’t know. My monitor had been on the blink and somehow the director didn’t get the information to me. To viewers, I must have seemed like a right dope.

Presenting a show like Grandstand is quite demanding, particularly so when the presentation is at an event, sometimes in the wind and rain, trying to listen to talkback instructions with a load of ambient noise going on around you. The studio-based shows were more comfortable, and the technicalities more reliable; nonetheless, five hours live on air, and sometime for much longer during the Olympics or other big events, make considerable demands on both mind and body.

I used to be able to get through the five hours, often without having to go to the toilet. I couldn’t do it now. Food was taken on board as the programme went out. I was caught with a mouthful of sandwich on more than one occasion when an event finished abruptly or when the studio director cut back to me suddenly.

The winter programmes, when there was a full football fixture list, involved the presenter commentating on the results as they came in – originally on the teleprinter, later the videprinter. I thoroughly enjoyed this part of the show, exercising my knowledge of players and league positions and sequences of victories or defeats. I usually spent one day a week honing that knowledge: as a supporter of one of the smaller clubs myself, I knew how important these small facts and figures were to the fans around the country, from Aberdeen to Exeter.

Occasionally, with your mind racing, you would make the odd mistake, relying on the editor to correct you. Once I said, ‘Southampton won 2–0, the same result as last year when they won 4–1.’ During the videprinter sequence, we would go live to the grounds for reports from key matches. John Philips, the editor, would sometimes forget to tell me where we were going next and I would prompt him through the viewer. ‘Now where shall we go to next?’ I would say down the camera lens, and Philips would then tell me, ‘Highbury, you prat’, or he would simply tell me to keep talking till they had a reporter on the line. It was fast-moving stuff. Nowadays, Sky Television build a whole programme around scores and results information. It is skilfully presented by Jeff Stelling, in my view their best sports broadcaster by miles. I can see the buzz he gets out of the show. It used to be the same for me.

Martin Hopkins, who directed nearly every Grandstand show I did, was an avid racing man. The custom was that he and the presenter would have a head to head bet on each race we were televising. He invariably won but it kept his interest at a peak.

For some of the years I was doing the show, the whole production team had to prepare quickly a five-minute sports bulletin for the South-East region. There were no reports or live action in this. The presenter simply read the copy put in front of him and hoped that the captions and still pictures fitted. Quite often they did not, and this became just about the hairiest programme that the sports department produced. Mostly, I managed to get out of it, and the broadcast was left to one of the newer faces; but those five minutes were always considerably more difficult than the five hours that had gone before.

While I found Grandstand challenging, presenting it always felt like it was something that came naturally to me. Around this time, I was asked to try something that really, really didn’t come naturally. Not a lot of people know this, but for a time I tried my hand, or voice, at the art of football commentary with BBC Television. Now I was asked to do a test commentary. It was not an ambition of mine but Alec Weeks, the senior football director, and Mike Murphy, the Match of the Day editor, who eventually became my Grandstand boss, thought I would be a useful addition to the commentary team behind John Motson and Barry Davies.

My first attempt was a trial commentary at an international match at Wembley between England and Wales. I did my homework and found the job relatively simple. Football commentary is easy. It’s good football commentary that’s difficult. Weeks wrote to me afterwards. ‘Your voice is clear. You have a wide range, your identification is sharp but your timing is appalling. We might get somewhere if we persevered on a few matches next season.’ We must have persevered because I was booked to do my first match for real a few weeks later. The game was Bristol City against Wolves in the old First Division. Only about four minutes went out on Match of the Day, but the edit was awful – or rather it underlined my lack of technique as I was heard to repeat the same phrase over and over. The match editor had not really been very sympathetic to the new boy. I did a little better as I went along and began getting some big games. I remember being at Maine Road for Manchester City against Liverpool, and I also commentated on some other top matches. And I am still remembered by a few people in Wales for being the commentator when Swansea beat Preston North End at Deepdale to earn a place in the top division for the first time in their history. John Toshack was the manager. Nobby Stiles lost his job at Preston after that game.

By the time the European Championship finals came round in Italy in 1980, I was one of the commentators despatched to cover the event. Greece against Czechoslovakia stands out in my mind. I had seen neither team before the game. Some of the names were impossible, but I struggled my way through. On the way to the game, John Philips, my producer, who would eventually become the editor of Grandstand, had nearly killed us as he drove the wrong way up a motorway sliproad. He saw the oncoming traffic just in time. There was an advert at the time for an Italian car where one guy says ‘But the steering wheel is on the wrong side’. His mate replies, ‘The way he drives, it makes no difference.’ It became a much repeated slogan during our stay in Italy.

Back home, I continued to do the odd game for Match of the Day and was called on again in a commentary capacity for the World Cup Finals held in Spain in 1982. I was the sort of ‘Kim Philby’ of the team, the third man to Motson and Davies again.

A problem match for me there was Italy against Cameroon, who were then playing in their first ever finals. There was no television in Cameroon at the time, and so no chance of seeing a tape of their players. I was familiar with the goalkeeper and one outfield player, Roger Milla. The Italians, on the other hand, were nearly all big names. They were the easy part. But Cameroon had most of the play, held the Italians to a draw, and should have won. The Italian press destroyed the team and manager after the game, so much so that the Italian squad imposed a boycott on them. Italy of course went on to win the World Cup that year. Many red faces in the Italian press corps, but that was the end of my brief life as a football commentator.

Soon afterwards I was also approached by Aubrey Singer, who at the time was Managing Director of BBC Radio. Aubrey had a proposition for me. At the time, my television career was just about getting under way. I had done a few Grandstands and was beginning to get the hang of it, but I still went back to radio for boxing and tennis commentaries. It was while I was covering the Wimbledon Championships for radio that Aubrey grabbed me. ‘As you know,’ he said, ‘Bob Burrows has left us for ITV and I wonder if you would consider the possibility of becoming the boss of radio sport.’ I was shocked and flattered. If the invitation had come a year or two before, when I felt terribly insecure on television, I think I would have jumped at it. I knew the radio set-up pretty well and had loved my time there; I also knew what a great department Burrows and Cliff Morgan had built. The trouble was that I was now thinking that I might carve out a bit of a future for myself on TV.

Did I really want to be on the administrative side of broadcasting? I thought about it very carefully and decided that I would gamble on making it on the box, though for a while afterwards, when things weren’t going too well, I wondered if I had made the right decision. As it turned out, my good friend Patricia Ewing eventually took over the department and made a huge success of it. I know she thinks I made the right decision – not just for me, but for BBC Radio Sport.

I was destined for other things.

6
ALL TANKED UP

The 1976 Olympics in Montreal, Canada, were the Games at which the world discovered the fabulous talent of Sugar Ray Leonard. In fact it was the last Olympics in which the Americans dominated the boxing events. In addition to Leonard, they had a brilliant lightweight in Howard Davis, who was selected as best boxer of the entire Games, outshining even Leonard. Then there were the Spinks brothers at middle and light-heavyweight and the flyweight Leo Randolph. Five gold medals. They couldn’t win the heavyweight gold though. That went to Cuba’s Teofilio Stevenson, who had won in Munich and would collect his third gold in Moscow in 1980. In Britain’s team were Pat Cowdell and Colin Jones, both of whom became outstanding professionals and contested world titles. Alongside them was Charlie Magri, a flyweight, who did win a world championship.

For these Games, BBC Radio had selected a certain Terry Wogan to be the presenter for the evening Olympic shows. Terry was based in London and turned out to be an inspired choice. An avid sports fan, though certainly no specialist, he brought just the right kind of irreverence and questioning approach to the broadcasts, plus of course his usual wit. ‘Smallbore rifle shooting’ was one sport out of which he got great mileage. I had many ‘two-ways’ down the line with him, both of us roaring with laughter.

One day I got an urgent call from BBC Television. Could I go into their studio and ‘dub’ some commentary on a few boxing contests – that is, record the commentary after the event – as Harry Carpenter had gone down with a throat infection. I was all set to do the job when Harry made a pretty swift recovery. Broadcasters do not easily give ground to anyone waiting in the wings.

My old mate Jonesy had a nasty experience in Montreal. Handsome devil that he was, he had no trouble attracting the ladies. One night he and a colleague, not me on this occasion, had gone back to the apartment of a very attractive girl and her friend for drinks. They were just enjoying their first one when there was a crash through the door and they were confronted by a rather large gentleman who turned out to be the husband of their hostess. The situation was manageable at that point, until he pulled out his hand-gun. This was when Jonesy, ever the erudite Cambridge man, proferred the wholly inadequate response, ‘Now we don’t want any unpleasantness.’ They got out in double-quick time, and literally ran for their lives.

Off air, I was spending a little leisure time with Dr Liz Ferris, a diving medallist at the Rome Olympics, who was part of our commentary team. Liz introduced me to acupuncture, which certainly helped with some back pain I was having, and she also tried to teach me to do a ‘tumble turn’ in the swimming pool, with less success. I think that was what was giving me the back pain in the first place, but I still have fond memories of Lizzie’s beaming smile and her head-back laughter as I nearly drowned on numerous occasions.

I got on with my radio work until it was time for the Games to come to an end. They had been pretty miserable in terms of British success. On the track, Brendan Foster’s bronze medal at 10,000 metres was the only one won. But David Wilkie had won a swimming gold in the breaststroke, and we had done very well in the modern pentathlon, winning gold there too.

The pentathlon team was led by Jim Fox, a big handsome blond athlete who had all the girls swooning. The modern pentathlon comprises shooting, fencing, riding, swimming and running, and was originally introduced into the Games to replicate the tests that a military messenger might have to encounter during a battle. In the fencing section, Fox discovered that his Soviet opponent, Boris Onishenko, seemed to be recording hits electronically when Fox knew that no contact had been made. The British competitor reluctantly reported his misgivings to the authorities – reluctantly, because Onishenko had been a fellow competitor at many championships and Jim had counted him a friend. It was subsequently found that Onishenko had cunningly rewired his weapon in such a way as to allow himself to record hits when none had in fact occurred. He was thrown out of the Games in disgrace.

After the Games, Phil King and I decided to take a break in New York, taking a train, the ‘Adirondack’, down through southern Canada, through Vermont and New England. The journey was most comfortable and slow, but it was all the better for that, allowing us to enjoy the splendid scenery.

We had arranged to stay in the apartment of a New York-based BBC man who was going off on holiday elsewhere. It happened to be in the same apartment block, and on the same floor, as the film actress Angie Dickinson. She said ‘Good morning’ to me one day. I could hardly get over it. Kingy and I resolved to ask her out for a spot of dinner if we bumped into her again. Pipe dream. Phil and I enjoyed the bars of Second Avenue and one or two parties at the British Airways ‘Speed-bird’ Club. I was offered a joint one night, but as a non-smoker couldn’t handle the inhaling and my career as a drug-taker lasted all of two minutes. I was content enjoying a few beers.

Back home, I returned to the routine of presenting the radio sports programmes and endeavouring to see my son as often as possible. He was growing up fast.

I had given up trying to commute from Brighton to London each day and, while keeping my own flat on the coast, was sharing an apartment in London with a lovely lady called Patty Smith. I met her through her daughter, Jenny, who had told me her mother, who was divorced, was looking for a p.g., as she put it – a paying guest. Things got a little tricky for a time, because Patty was as glamorous as her daughter.

Later I shared a house with a great friend, Mike Greenlees, who went on to become a huge player in the world of advertising. We were two Jack the Lads for a time: nice house in Putney, which he owned, two sports cars parked outside, ready for action. We were rather like the Jack Lemmon–Walter Matthau pairing in The Odd Couple, advertising man and sports journalist, one tidy and organised (Mike), the other messy and disorganised (me).

As well as the sport, I was now asked to present a radio quiz programme called Treble Chance Quiz. The programme took two team captains around the country and they competed against each other with members of the public from the town we were visiting against an ‘away’ team. The team captains were usually Patrick Moore, the astronomer, and the late Ted Moult. The producer was a long-term BBC man, Michael Tuke-Hastings. Michael was fun but an absolute snob. Once, recording at Warwick Castle, he described our host, who seemed to me to be a perfectly charming and well-educated man, as ‘strictly minor public school’. Another time, we were staying in a small hotel when the receptionist announced there was a telephone call for ‘the Duke of Hastings’ instead of Tuke-Hastings. Michael certainly acted like he should have had a title.

The next year he involved me in the overseas version of the show called Forces Chance, which as well as going out on Radio 4 was broadcast on the Forces network. This took me to Gibraltar, Malta, West Germany and the then divided city of Berlin. The show’s next producer was Patricia Ewing, who went on to become the Head of Sport and Outside Broadcasts, and afterwards ran Radio 5. Pat was an ex-WRNS officer who introduced me to the delights of the old naval drink – a ‘horse’s neck’: brandy with dry ginger. Ted Moult was involved in this show too, in which the celebrities took on teams from the armed services in general knowledge. Neil Durden-Smith, the husband of Judith Chalmers, plus the BBC’s first female television newsreader, Nan Winton, were the other team members, although Sue Lawley soon took over from Nan. Some years later Ted, who seemed the happiest of men, took a gun and shot himself. No one understood why, least of all his large and loving family.

While in Germany we made a poignant visit to the museum at Belsen, where they say ‘no bird ever sings’. We were treated royally by the Forces: the army breakfasts in the officers’ mess, and getting our shoes cleaned by someone else, almost made joining up seem attractive. In West Germany we spent some time with a tank regiment and both Sue and I were given instruction on how to drive a tank. Later, when we went to Berlin, another tank regiment made us the same offer. I asked the corporal appointed to give me instruction if the tank in question was the same model as I had driven a few days before. It was. I told him to say nothing to the officer standing by, got into the driving position, started it up, shot around the compound a few times, over a few hills and humps, and delivered it back to the feet of the officer. He was white. ‘Nippy aren’t they?’ I said. The corporal loved it.

7
GUN TROUBLE IN TEXAS

My ongoing love affair with boxing continued apace, and it was around this time that I covered Jim Watt’s period as the World lightweight champion. Jim had been a useful boxer in a domestic sense until joining the Terry Lawless stable. Lawless helped him hone his skills to international level and had the connections to steer him to the world title.

Jim was a hugely attractive proposition for those of us in the media. He was very articulate and gave great interviews and of course has gone on to become an outstanding broadcaster on the sport. One of his title defences took place in the open air at Rangers’ Ibrox stadium in Glasgow. His opponent was Howard Davis, the man who had been voted the outstanding boxer of the 1976 Olympic Games. Watt was too good for him though.

In 1981 I went to Houston, Texas to commentate on Pat Cowdell’s challenge for the World featherweight title held by the Mexican Salvador Sanchez. It was a tough call for Cowdell. Sanchez was considered by many experts to be the best ‘pound for pound’ fighter in the world at the time. A few days before the fight, I took a taxi from the airport to my hotel and noticed that the glass was missing in one of the side windows in the back of the car. It had been replaced by a piece of cardboard.

‘What happened to your window? I asked the driver.

‘Oh, some crazy guy is taking pot shots at cars in the city,’ the driver replied, seemingly unconcerned.

‘Have they arrested him? I enquired.

‘Nope, haven’t found him yet.’ I slunk down in the seat.

Later that evening it wasn’t the sniper’s gun I was worried about.

Suffering from jet lag, I had trouble getting to sleep but eventually nodded off with the light on. At around 3 a.m. I was awoken when the door to my room sprung open, held only by the security chain I had remembered to attach. Then, to my horror, a gun was poked through the gap and a voice said: ‘Please come to the door and open it.’ I thought, ‘This is it. I’m in a violent city and am about to be robbed at best, and maybe shot as well.’

I managed to get a few words out. ‘What the hell is going on?’

The voice replied. ‘This is hotel security. According to our records this room should be unoccupied.’ An accreditation badge was eased through the gap. The check-in receptionist had recorded that I was in another room. Her mistake could easily have resulted in a Lynam heart attack.

In the fight, Cowdell put up a valiant challenge before losing on points over fifteen rounds. Not long after, Sanchez was killed in a car accident.

I first came across Finbar Patrick (‘Barry’) McGuigan at the Commonwealth Games in Edmonton Canada in 1978. He was just seventeen years of age and boxing for Northern Ireland. This was an anomaly because Barry was actually from the Irish Republic and two years later he would compete in Moscow for the Irish Olympic team.

He was a sensation in Edmonton and made it all the way to the bantamweight final, in which he had to box a tough customs officer from Papua New Guinea called Tumat Sogolik. It was boy against mature man, but I called the fight narrowly for McGuigan. This was in the days before computer scoring came into amateur boxing. On television, Harry Carpenter felt that he hadn’t quite done enough. As it turned out, McGuigan got the decision and his old club coach in Northern Ireland rang him to tell him that I had called it his way. It was just my honest opinion at the time, but Barry became a fan of mine, as of course I did of him.

The Edmonton Commonwealth Games had been my second trip to Canada. I enjoyed some marvellous hospitality, especially from a petite and vivacious girl who was working at the Games. I seemed to fall on my feet at these major tournaments.

Once again Wogan was orchestrating the broadcasts from his studio in London and persuaded me to sing the ‘Londonderry Air’ (aka ‘Danny Boy’) live on the programme after McGuigan’s win. You would not have wanted to hear it.

On the flight home from Edmonton, a fellow commentator found himself seated between Mary Peters, the athletics gold medallist from the 1972 Olympics, and Anita Lonsborough, who had been Olympic champion in the swimming pool at the Rome Games in 1960. Both were travelling back in their pristine cream blazers provided by the BBC for the Games. Unfortunately my colleague had enjoyed a considerable amount of hospitality in the departure lounge, liberally topped up after boarding the aircraft, and proceeded to throw up. Two blazers and two gold medallists were despoiled in one ghastly moment. Embarrassed though he still is about it, he recently described it as ‘a record that will never be broken’.

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