Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  The 1970s and 1980s were marked by industrial disruption and civil unrest, but there were also encouraging signs that some of the more unpleasant aspects of British society were slowly but surely starting to change. At the end of November 1978, Viv Anderson, the Nottingham Forest full-back, became the first black player to play for the full England team. It was a staging post on a journey that had led from the Empire Windrush through the Notting Hill race riots of 1958 to the disgraceful events in the Smethwick constituency at the general election of 1964 in which the Tory candidate Peter Griffith approved his campaign slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’ and won the seat from the incumbent, the shadow foreign secretary Patrick Gordon Walker with a swing of 7.2 per cent to the Conservatives. Four years later, in April 1968, Enoch Powell spoke at a meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre and, as a true classicist, quoted Virgil as he spoke of his vision, ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’ As a provocative opposition to the Labour government’s policy on Commonwealth immigration and its proposed anti-discrimination legislation, it could not have had a greater impact. It roused the London dockers and people all over the country who felt threatened by the rising tide of immigration from the former colonies. It raised the prospect of race riots, yet although there were outbreaks of violence and plenty of tensions for the next decade after Powell’s speech, the fact remains that Britain did not sink beneath rising rivers of blood.

  Football was a highly visible stage on which the themes of racial conflict were played out as black players started to make their first appearances as professional footballers in the 1960s. Few of them found it a comfortable experience. The South African Albert Johanneson, a fast and skilful left-winger for Leeds United, was the first black man to appear in an FA Cup final when he played in the 2–1 defeat to Liverpool in 1965. He and Clyde Best, the Bermudian who played as a centre-forward for West Ham United from 1968, were treated to the full range of racist antagonism. The monkey chants from the terraces and the hurling of bananas deeply affected Best and almost destroyed Johanneson, who declined into alcoholism and died alone and almost forgotten in 1995. His cause as a regular player in the Leeds United first team was not helped by the emergence of Eddie Gray whom Revie clearly preferred, just as Best’s appearances were probably boosted by the fact that nobody of Gray’s talent emerged to take his place. Upton Park was always an odd place for Best to play, given that east London contained so many committed supporters of Enoch Powell and his racial theories, but Best’s hard work and good humour eventually won the crowd over. In the end supporters, unless their racism is so deeply ingrained it simply cannot be argued against, will take to their hearts a player who commits himself to their cause and whose skill is such that he can make the team better.

  It was not until the 1970s, however, that black players emerged in significant numbers, not just in football but throughout British sport. In 1972, Clive Sullivan, the Hull FC and Hull Kingston Rovers winger, captained the Great Britain rugby league side to a World Cup victory. John Conteh, the Liverpool boxer, became the WBC light heavyweight champion in 1974, a title he held for three years. Black cricketers like Gary Sobers, Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards, Joel Garner, Michael Holding, Gordon Greenidge, indeed most of that all-conquering West Indies team of the late 1970s, graced county cricket from the start of the decade. Warwickshire boasted four of them in the same team in 1972 – Rohan Kanhai, Alvin Kallicharran, Lance Gibbs and the wicketkeeper Deryck Murray. Black faces were becoming an unremarkable sight on English sports fields and supporters mostly accepted their integration into what had previously been all-white teams relatively quickly.

  Elsewhere in the west Midlands, Ron Atkinson, the manager of West Bromwich Albion, developed three young black players whom he jokingly referred to as the Three Degrees. Laurie Cunningham, Cyrille Regis (who were originally signed by John Giles) and Brendon Batson were part of an attractive side that finished third behind Liverpool and Nottingham Forest in the 1978–9 season. In April 1977, Cunningham, born in Archway in north London, was the first black player to be capped for England at any level above schoolboy international when he scored on his debut in 1977 for the Under-21 side against Scotland. He was later transferred to Real Madrid in the days when such transfers were virtually unheard of. Unfortunately, injuries restricted his appearances and he faded from the game in his late twenties after playing for other clubs in Spain as well as Marseilles. He died in a car crash in Madrid at the age of thirty-three but not before he had shown what was possible for young black men who wanted to play professional football. The year after Cunningham had first played for the England Under-21 side, Anderson, born in Nottingham, was selected by Ron Greenwood to make his debut for the full England side against Czechoslovakia at Wembley. That same year the BBC was finally embarrassed into cancelling The Black and White Minstrel Show. It had regularly claimed audiences of up to twelve million viewers, which was why the BBC was reluctant to abandon it, but the clamour from black activists and the liberal press never relented and in the end the BBC felt it had no choice. The death of The Black and White Minstrel Show, followed a few weeks later by the selection of England’s first black full international, felt like a significant staging-post in post-war race relations.

  The war wasn’t yet won. Racial abuse would still be a feature of certain sections of certain grounds for many years to come. Well into the twenty-first century, black English players would be the target of racist taunts when playing in Spain and Eastern Europe. What made it so shocking was that for many of them it was the first time they had come across it, because by the end of the twentieth century English football had integrated its different ethnic minorities better than most countries. After Anderson and the three West Brom players came John Barnes, Des Walker, Rio Ferdinand and Ashley Cole among a host of others. The appearance of a black face in an England shirt no longer attracts any comment, which reflects the country’s metamorphosis into a multi-cultural nation. It took some sports longer than others but that, too, reflected the society in which talented young sports people grew up.

  Tennis and golf clubs did not boast many black members and the sad decline of cricket in state schools has meant that the England team in recent years has reverted largely to a mainly all-white one. In the 1980s and 1990s the emergence of Roland Butcher, Norman Cowans, Gladstone Small, Phil DeFreitas, Wilf Slack, Devon Malcolm, Dean Headley, Chris Lewis, Mark Butcher and Alex Tudor gave the England cricket team a truly representative look. Now only Chris Jordan, who was born in Barbados, is even close to appearing for England although Moeen Ali is a welcome addition to the Test and ODI side. Cricket is mostly played in independent schools because they have the money for the groundsman, the pitches and the equipment which state schools do not.

  Black British teenagers do not identify with the West Indies cricket team the way their parents and grandparents did, so to that extent they have passed Norman Tebbit’s test for what constitutes British identity. They do not turn The Oval or Lord’s into the Kensington Oval in Barbados or Sabina Park in Kingston, Jamaica, the way their parents did during the West Indies tours of the 1960s and 1970s. If those West Indies teams were winning sides and since the retirement of Brian Lara, Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh the West Indies have struggled, the key fact is that black British teenagers now consider themselves to be native black British not West Indian immigrants. Their allegiance is to Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham and their sport is football not cricket, because if they went to state schools and watched only terrestrial television they wouldn’t have experienced much cricket. There is football to be played in the park and to be seen on television twelve months a year.

  Until the emergence of BSkyB in 1990, football coverage on British television remained strictly a two-channel affair. As far as ITV was concerned, however, it was largely a one-channel affair. The commercial network remained perennially annoyed that
the BBC could always claim smugly – when the two broadcasters went head-to-head with simultaneous televising of World Cup games or the FA Cup final – that audience figures confirmed viewers preferred the BBC coverage to that of ITV.

  An indication of how nasty this rivalry could turn occurred during the 1969 FA Cup final between Manchester City and Leicester City. The Manchester City manager Joe Mercer had been a star of the BBC’s 1966 World Cup coverage and Malcolm Allison, his coach and assistant manager, had been signed by ITV, for whom he was to make a big splash on its innovative panel for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. Allison, who resented the fact that Joe Mercer was walking out at the head of the Manchester City team, had in any case been banned from even sitting next to Mercer because he was serving one of his many touchline bans for having verbally abused the match officials. Mercer was sitting on the team bench under the Royal Box and giving his comments into an official BBC microphone thrust under his chin during the course of the match, which were fed into the live transmission. Allison wanted those cameras on him. He felt he would be much more entertaining than Mercer, so much more insightful in his analysis. Instead he sat and suffered because, although his friend the journalist Paul Doherty was sitting next to him in the stand with an illicit microphone up his sleeve and asking the occasional question, his comments would be transmitted on ITV, and despite his future relationship with commercial television he knew perfectly well how few people watched ITV on Cup final day.

  Not only were ITV resentful about their perceived inferiority on days of dual broadcasts but they resented equally the fact that Match of the Day had grabbed the prime football slot on Saturday nights. The Big Match, which London Weekend Television transmitted along with the regional variations in all other parts of the ITV network that showed matches local to their franchise area, was not transmitted until Sunday afternoons, by which time the Sunday newspapers had been read and it all felt a little second-hand. By 1978, the long-standing resentment had mixed with a more immediate commercial imperative for Michael Grade, who had recently been promoted from Head of Light Entertainment at LWT to Programme Controller, which meant he was responsible for all of the company’s programmes and, in conjunction with the other Big Five Programme Controllers, their scheduling.

  LWT’s weekly franchise ran from seven o’clock on Friday evening until closedown on Sunday nights although LWT accused Thames Television of deliberately putting on unpopular programmes just before LWT took over. So heated were LWT’s protestations that the IBA eventually allowed the company to begin broadcasting at 5.15 p.m. LWT nevertheless still only had three evenings a week to generate revenue where Thames had four, and Michael Grade was acutely conscious that the BBC consistently fired its biggest guns on Saturday nights. There was a strong belief among television schedulers, in the days when you had to get out of the armchair and press a button on the television set in order to change the channel, that people were actually too lazy to do so. Before the scheduler’s nightmare – otherwise known as the remote control – became an everyday accessory, successful schedules were built on the ‘inheritance factor’. A family that watched Dr Who and The Generation Game would stay with BBC1 for the rest of Saturday evening. Grade recalls:

  The battle for Saturday night was not really about sport. The BBC took the view that they had to win Saturday night. Anything that got good ratings in midweek like Dick Emery got moved into Saturday night. ITV’s weekend schedule was masterminded by LWT but it didn’t own the whole of the network for the weekend and you had to get the support of the other ITV companies. When Yorkshire came up with a big hit like Rising Damp they would never let us play it at the weekend. They kept it in a soft slot midweek against Panorama where the BBC weren’t competing. It was a big struggle for ITV and particularly LWT and it took years to turn it round. The BBC had an unbeatable line-up – Dr Who, Jim’ll Fix It, All Creatures Great and Small, Kojak, The Generation Game, The Two Ronnies, then Match of the Day and finally Parky. Little by little we turned it round starting with Game for a Laugh. That was the first big home-grown show ITV had on Saturday night and then we started The Professionals and it built from that.

  Grade was particularly interested in sport himself because he had grown up with his father, Leslie Grade, as a Charlton Athletic supporter. When the time came for him to enter the world of work it was Leslie who persuaded Hugh Cudlipp to find young Michael a job on the sports desk at the Daily Mirror. It was an awkward way in because nobody took kindly to this son of a rich man being parachuted into the sports department by the man who ran the paper. But for Michael Grade, the football fanatic, it was an opportunity to be grabbed with both hands:

  My first assignment when I joined the Daily Mirror sports desk in the summer of 1960 was to go and sit at the Ministry of Labour to keep an eye on things as the footballers’ strike over the maximum wage was being hammered out. It was an object lesson for me because Alan Hardaker, who ran the Football League, was dour and taciturn and came out after each session and ignored the press, but Jimmy Hill on behalf of the PFA came out, sat down with the press, nattered away, gave us quotes and a story and it was a good lesson to me in media management. In the days when there was just the BBC and ITV, sport was a very competitive battleground. There was little or no live football outside the FA Cup final. There was only Match of the Day and The Big Match on ITV with regional variations on Sunday afternoons. Boxing was also very big in those days with huge tension between us and the BBC to get the big fights with Barry McGuigan, Henry Cooper, Sugar Ray Leonard and of course the heavyweight title fights. There were always battles with Don King and Harry Levine and Jack Solomons, who didn’t speak to each other. There were also big arguments over duplication of coverage of the World Cups and the Olympics.

  Grade wanted both to persuade the BBC to alternate instead of duplicate sports coverage because ITV was wasting money and resources on having to compete in a losing battle with the BBC, and at the same time make inroads into the BBC’s seemingly impregnable line-up of popular programmes on Saturday night. The best way, he decided, was to make a frontal assault on Match of the Day which would be difficult because BBC and ITV operated an effective cartel in which they agreed on a joint approach to the Football League with a view to keeping down the cost of televised football. If he were prepared to break the cartel and alienate everyone at the BBC – and probably a lot of executives at ITV – it might be possible. Grade was always a man for decisive positive action.

  In November 1978, Jim Callaghan’s Labour government was about to enter the ‘winter of discontent’, but in ITV there was more than discontent: there was absolute panic. Grade had recently, after much effort, succeeded in seducing Bruce Forsyth from The Generation Game to LWT to front Bruce Forsyth’s Big Night, which was to be the linchpin of the new Saturday-night ITV schedule. Forsyth received £15,000 a show and the programme was generously budgeted at £250,000 for each episode – astonishing sums for the time, and eloquent testimony to the importance of winning the Saturday-night ratings war. Unfortunately the new show, which began a run of twelve episodes in October 1978, did not appeal strongly to either audiences or critics and, even worse, The Generation Game – under a new host, Larry Grayson – recovered spectacularly from Forsyth’s defection and continued to win the early-evening battle. Audiences for Bruce’s Big Night continued to spiral downwards. Grade had to find another way to dent the BBC’s apparent impregnability.

  On 9 November, as the House of Commons was debating the Queen’s Speech, Grade went to meet Jack Dunnett, the MP for Nottingham East, a backbench Labour MP and former chairman of Brentford, now chairman of Notts County and a junior member of the management committee that ran league football. Grade and Dunnett knew and liked each other. Dunnett, like Grade, was Jewish; his family had fled to Scotland from Poland and Lithuania. He was also a man for the bold move. Before Robert Maxwell failed to merge Oxford United with Reading to form Thames Valley Royals, Jack Dunnett had suggested merging Brentford with Queens Park Ran
gers, which made financial sense but caused such outrage that he was forced to leave Brentford.

  Dunnett met Grade in the Strangers’ Bar, known as the Kremlin, and proposed that ITV should take exclusive charge of Saturday-night football. To an extent Dunnett could see that Grade was pushing at an open door. For years the Football League had resented the BBC/ITV cartel and felt strongly that television was getting football on the cheap. BBC and ITV together were paying around £500,000 a year, which meant, on the basis of equal shares for all ninety-two clubs, only about £5,000 per club. However, even as Grade and Dunnett discussed the possibility of what became known as ‘Snatch of the Day’, the BBC and ITV were jointly negotiating to renew the contract with the Football League under the terms of the old arrangement.

  Dunnett was broadly in favour of the ITV bid and returned to talk to Hardaker and the Football League management committee. Meanwhile, Grade had the job – in an industry that traditionally can’t keep anything secret for more than five minutes – of keeping any whisper of the new proposal away from anyone, particularly Jimmy Hill and the ITV negotiator Gerry Loftus. Grade returned to LWT and started to talk to John Bromley, his Head of Sport, who had been his boss when he had first started on the sports desk of the Daily Mirror. Bromley had enormous respect for Grade but even he was astounded at the risk his Programme Controller was prepared to run;