I had to get the support of the ITV network and the IBA because we knew there would be a stink and we needed to keep them onside. Programme Controllers and Managing Directors decided we should keep it to ourselves and not tell the network Head of Sport who was Gerry Loftus at Granada because we didn’t know whose loyalties were where and we didn’t want it to leak. It was agreed that I was authorised to try and close the deal with the Football League. When the fertiliser hit the air conditioner, we agreed we would tell the BBC that we would have a conversation with them but only on the condition that we would look at alternating the Olympic Games because we were spending a fortune covering them head-to-head and they simply refused to discuss it with us. The IBA was very keen on alternation in the interests of the viewers and they were right. On that basis everyone at ITV agreed.
Paul Fox, who had left the BBC in 1973 after six years as Controller of BBC1 to take over as Director of Programmes at Yorkshire Television, was the first person Grade told. Fox, who understood very well the importance of the exclusive rights to football, agreed with the approach and backed Grade at the meeting of ITV Programme Controllers, which always took place on Monday mornings. On the Tuesday morning, Hardaker arrived at the Great Western Hotel in Paddington and over breakfast Grade explained to him and Dunnett what he had in mind. Giving ITV exclusive Saturday-night football would mean no Sunday-afternoon football on television and the halving of the amount of televised football might drive people back into the grounds again.
The result of the hard negotiations with Dunnett and Hardaker was that ITV would pay £5.5 million over three years for exclusive rights. The clubs would now get £17,000 a season, an increase of over 300 per cent. The BBC’s Match of the Day would be starved to death. On the Thursday morning at the Wembley Conference Centre, the ten-man Football League management committee met and approved the new deal. At 2.30 p.m. that day, fifty-one men representing the entire Football League met and approved it by a vote of 50:1. The dissenter was the Coventry City managing director, Jimmy Hill. At 3.45 p.m. the nervous Grade and Brommers, as John Bromley was always called, were told the good news and at 7 p.m. LWT hosted a press conference. By that time Jimmy Hill, now ensconced as the chief presenter of Match of the Day, had obviously told his employers why they were popping champagne corks at LWT. Hardaker then telephoned Alan Hart, the BBC Head of Sport, and gave him the bad news. By 7.30 p.m. the newspapers were hastily recomposing their front pages.
Michael Grade, Brian Moore and John Bromley after the announcement that ITV had secured exclusive coverage of League football, 17 November 1978 (Keystone / Getty Images).
To the joy of the press, there was open warfare between ITV and the BBC. Jimmy Hill described Michael Grade and Brommers as hooligans. Alasdair Milne, the BBC Director of Programmes, went on Nationwide and called them ‘Mafia with cheque books’. The bitterness caused the war to escalate. The BBC sued the Football League for breach of contract on the grounds that they couldn’t negotiate with anyone else without informing the BBC first (which they hadn’t) and sought an injunction to stop the deal with LWT. Gordon Borrie, head of the Office of Fair Trading, began an investigation to determine whether the new contract violated the Restrictive Practices Act – which it did. Both Labour and Tory MPs denounced this act of what they regarded as piracy. The European Commission said darkly they would see if it flouted the rule of competition as laid down in the Treaty of Rome.
The pressure that was brought to bear was eventually overwhelming. The deal was quashed and a compromise agreed so that the BBC and ITV would alternate Saturday-night football for the next four seasons. Michael Grade had taken on the establishment and lost heroically. Trevor East, who eventually became Head of Sport at ITV, believes that the spin ITV put on the compromise was a little disingenuous:
The BBC overreacted to ‘Snatch of the Day’. It was as if ITV had raped the BBC’s mother-in-law. Michael Grade wanted to steal the football, all of it, from under the noses of the BBC. I remember he and Brommers punching the air in delight thinking they’d nicked it. So all that stuff about all they wanted at the end of the day was alternation is just rubbish. The final deal meant that the Saturday-night football alternated from season to season for the duration of the contract, which I think was for four years between ITV and the BBC, but ITV’s programme was still done regionally. We did the first year but now it meant a studio show. Gary [Newbon] did the presentation and in one of my most inspired moments I signed Jimmy Greaves to be our pundit. I think that was 1979 or 1980 and a few years later it became Saint and Greavsie.
Grade had always known that to pull off such an audacious move would be tough and he knew that the BBC wouldn’t like it, but he thought it would be viewed as if ITV had poached Morecambe and Wise (formerly clients of Leslie Grade) – which they did as well. The world, never mind the world of television, now knew and rather admired Michael Grade so there was some compensation in his heroic defeat. He was no longer just the nephew of Lew Grade and Bernard Delfont. Bill Cotton, who had also moved from Head of Light Entertainment to running a channel as the Controller of BBC1, told Grade that he wouldn’t get more than eight million viewers for an ITV Saturday-night football show and certainly not the fourteen million that ITV were hoping for. Cotton ensured that he was right by scheduling a big feature film against ITV’s football show. After many more twists and turns, Match of the Day has remained a staple of the Saturday-night schedule on BBC1 for fifty years.
Everyone recovered from what had been a most unseemly spat. Grade, of course, went on to a stellar career which included returning to the BBC in 1984 as Controller of BBC1 with the connivance of Bill Cotton. The Football League was not unhappy. Their long-standing fears that television would destroy football were never borne out and, after the negotiations were completed in early 1979, its income from television increased fivefold to £10 million over the four years of the new contract. It was nothing compared to what was to come with the formation of the more acquisitive and avaricious Premier League but for the time being they were happy that football was no longer under threat from television.
The power of television in the national culture grew exponentially in the 1970s, its influence apparent in every aspect of life in the United Kingdom, from politics to the arts, and nowhere was that power more apparent than in sport. Michael Grade’s uncle, Lew Grade, the irresistible force behind ATV Network, one of the Big Five of the ITV federation of companies, was the man who rescued Billy Wright. The former England captain might have failed as the manager of Arsenal but his was still a name to conjure with, a name that had a certain commercial worth. Even if Grade had simply wanted Wright for the commercial value of his name and personality it turned out to be an inspired appointment for both parties.
The initial assumption was that Billy Wright would become the face of ATV Sport, but it was quickly apparent that he was as comfortable in front of the camera as he had been as the manager of Arsenal who had just dropped a senior player with a short fuse. Trevor East, behind the camera, struggled to get the best out of his boss.
Billy started on camera – he was hopeless – he couldn’t even read the autocue. ‘Here’s Dennis Team with the Shaw changes’ was one of his attempts. Once on a Friday night when he was winding up the programme, I told him to say goodbye and wish all the viewers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year – it took him sixteen takes before he got it right. As a trainee assistant producer I could see what was going on so I tried to persuade Billy and [ATV executive] Tony Flanagan to let Gary [Newbon] do the on-air presenting and turn Billy into a pundit. I wanted Billy to be the ATV equivalent of Malcolm Allison on the ITV World Cup panel. I said to Billy that every week he could choose a different subject, I would cut some pictures together and then Billy would become the intelligent voice of ATV Sport, analysing players, their strengths and weaknesses and so on.
Billy Wright’s strongest point in television, as it had been in football, was that everyone simply liked him – a lot. He was
a kind man who was interested in people – and that made him a superb ambassador for ATV, as Gary Newbon remembers:
Lew Grade loved Billy and sent him to have lunch with Guinness who ended up spending £5 million with ATV. That made Billy very valuable to Lew. Billy had to get Lew FA Cup final tickets for his American clients and Billy was so nervous he would hand-deliver them. There must have been a thousand people working for ATV and Billy knew the names of every one of them. He was amazing the way he retained that knowledge of people he had met for five minutes; he could greet them by name two years later. He never ever refused an autograph. He never refused a chat. The difference between his generation and now was that he came from ordinary people.
As Head of Outside Broadcasts at ATV, Billy found his niche although he wasn’t always the most conventional of executives. He once asked the twenty-five-year-old Gary Newbon to come up from Westward Television, which was based in Plymouth, for an interview in Birmingham. When Newbon arrived he discovered that Wright hadn’t told his secretary about the appointment and, instead of being behind his desk, had gone to see his dentist in London. As a fledgling drama producer at ATV in 1977, I discovered to my delight that Billy Wright was the man who was technically in charge of allocating the crew I needed for exterior filming. I spent a lot of time in Billy’s office but very little was spent talking about film crews, although a lot was spent talking about Ferenc Puskás. If I needed two tickets to watch Manchester City at Aston Villa the ex-England captain was the man who provided them with a large smile and a warning of imminent defeat. Billy Wright, observed Gary Newbon, was a very famous man who never reminded you of the fact.
He had his demons, his convivial nature leading him into a dangerous addiction to alcohol. Just as he believed he had conquered those demons, in 1994 he succumbed to cancer at the age of seventy. Wright came from the era of the maximum wage, Moore from the era that followed its abolition, but both men won over a hundred international caps and led England on to the field on ninety occasions. Wright recovered from his mortifying departure from full-time occupation in football when he was dismissed by Arsenal in a way that Moore never really did. The FA had made an initial effort to look after Wright, but, for reasons that are still unfathomable, the FA never bothered to do the same with Moore. In view of what he and Ramsey had contributed to English football it remains astonishing that they were ignored during the 1980s in such a humiliating manner. Wright never lost his love of the game but there is no doubt that in middle age he felt much more secure being employed by a television company than he had been as the employed manager of a football club at the mercy of unpredictable results.
There was a considerable threat to football in the 1970s and 1980s but it didn’t come from television. It came on the terraces of football grounds; it came from the streets surrounding football grounds; it came from the railway stations where rival gangs clashed and eventually it all spilled on to the pitch itself. Hooliganism had started in earnest in the late 1960s but it took nearly twenty years before the football authorities did anything about it. They insisted that it was a social problem, and that it was up to the government of the day to introduce legislation to solve it. The clubs did not see that they were in any way responsible and they remained intransigent until ninety-six people died in the Hillsborough disaster of 1989. The Labour government of Wilson and Callaghan that was in office when football-related violence started to make itself felt, just like the clubs where the trouble was occurring, effectively left the problem of football hooliganism to the police to sort out.
The author remembers only too well the moment in April 1974 when Manchester United fans invaded the pitch at Old Trafford after Denis Law, who had been transferred from United to Manchester City at the start of that 1973–4 season, had back-heeled a cross from Francis Lee past Alex Stepney. There was less than ten minutes to go and the defeat would send Manchester United down to the Second Division irrespective of other results. Law was immediately substituted but it was apparent to everyone in the ground that the hooligan element behind the goal at the scoreboard end were not going to watch their team being relegated without trying something to prevent it. Everyone in the ground could feel that a pitch invasion had been brewing for some time when fans with red scarves climbed out of the terraces and swarmed all over the pitch, causing the game to be abandoned. The Football League later confirmed that the result would stand as Manchester United 0 Manchester City 1. On the train back to London Euston gangs of hooligans roamed the corridors looking for Manchester City fans on whom to vent their fury. The episode was the nearest that the author, travelling in frustrated silence with the future Director of the London School of Economics, ever came to physical injury as a football supporter and – like the result – it has never been forgotten.
These Manchester United ‘supporters’ formed themselves into the ‘Red Army’, a hooligan ‘firm’ which caused mayhem at grounds up and down the country the following season when the club paid its brief visit to the Second Division. That same year a Bolton Wanderers fan stabbed a young Blackpool fan to death behind the Kop at Bloomfield Road during a Second Division match. These two events led to the introduction of crowd segregation and the erection of fences at football grounds in England, a move that was to have deadly consequences in 1989.
In the 1975 European Cup final in Paris, Leeds United were beaten 2–0 by Bayern Munich after an appalling display from the referee who disallowed a perfectly good goal by Peter Lorimer and refused a clear penalty to Leeds. The referee originally gave the goal but was convinced by Franz Beckenbauer to consult the linesman who had not raised his flag and who had already run back to the halfway line. The goal was disallowed for offside against Billy Bremner, who had not been interfering with play. The Leeds fans, who had seen enough bad decisions go against them over the years and hadn’t yet forgiven Ray Tinkler for the goal he had permitted Jeff Astle to score at Elland Road that robbed Leeds of the title in 1971, could stand it no longer. They began to tear up the seats at the Parc des Princes and hurl them on to the pitch. What ensued was a riot in full view of the millions watching on television throughout Europe. Leeds were banned from Europe for four years (reduced on appeal to two) and the world became aware that there was a new ‘English disease’ to go with industrial strikes.
And it wasn’t just Leeds or Manchester United or even Millwall fans – the usual suspects – who were turning nasty. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the supporters of over twenty clubs formed some sort of gang to which they gave aggressive nicknames – West Ham United had the InterCity Firm, Chelsea had their Headhunters, Leeds United their Service Crew and Aston Villa the Villa Hardcore. When these clubs came to town, shopkeepers closed early and boarded up their premises. European cities reacted similarly when English clubs played in Europe or England played overseas. But neither the football authorities nor the government did anything about it until Margaret Thatcher got involved.
On 13 March 1985 violence erupted at Kenilworth Road during the Luton Town v. Millwall FA Cup sixth-round tie. Millwall were in the Third Division but under George Graham they were challenging for promotion to Division Two, while Luton were struggling at the foot of the First Division. Millwall already had a reputation for violence off the field but in 1985 such high-profile matches were not all-ticket and therefore open to anyone who paid at the turnstiles. For the relatively easy trip to Luton in a game of high importance to both clubs a large volume of away supporters gathered in pubs and in the centre of Luton three hours before kick-off. When violence inevitably broke out the police were ill-equipped to deal with it.
The battle moved on to Kenilworth Road. The turnstiles could not cope with the crush and became stuck. Inside the ground, the police were helpless as hundreds of the visitors scaled the fences in front of the stand to rush down the pitch towards Luton’s supporters in the packed Oak Road End. A hail of bottles, cans, nails and coins saw the home supporters fleeing up the terraces, but their numbers, still growing as fans en
tered the stand, meant that there was little they could do to avoid the missiles. The players came out to warm up, and almost immediately vanished back up the tunnel as the rioters started ripping out seats and brandishing them as weapons. A message appeared on the stadium’s electronic scoreboard, stating that the match would not start until they returned to their allocated area, but this was ignored; an appeal from the Millwall manager George Graham over the ground’s loudspeaker also had no effect. It was only the arrival of police dogs that helped to clear the pitch. Unbelievably, the match began on time, with many peering down at the players after scaling the floodlight pylons. After fourteen minutes the referee took the players off but reappeared twenty-five minutes later and the match restarted.
Brian Stein scored the only goal of the game after half an hour, but the result was the last thing on anyone’s mind. Luton’s goalkeeper Les Sealey was hit by a missile hurled from the crowd and later a knife was found in the goalmouth where he had been standing. As in the Manchester derby of 1974, it was obvious that it was the Millwall hooligans’ intention to invade the pitch in order to get the match abandoned and replayed starting again at 0–0. The extra police who had been summoned to deal with the extraordinary circumstances managed to keep the fans off the pitch, but as the final whistle blew they could restrain them no longer and were overwhelmed as fans ripped up seats and invaded the pitch. The players fled down the tunnel as a pitched battle raged. One policeman was hit with a slab of concrete and thirty others were also injured as the violence flowed out of Kenilworth Road and back into the town centre, leaving a trail of broken windows, damaged cars and wrecked property.
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