Search: 'Get With The Programme'

My Autobiography
by John Robertson
Mainstream, £17.99
Reviewed by Geoff Wallis
From WSC 298 December 2011

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In his preface to WH Davies's The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, first published in 1908, George Bernard Shaw revealed that he did not know whether to describe its Welsh subject as "a lucky man or an unlucky one". A century later this autobiography by the self-styled "chubby little lad from Uddingston" insists that luck played a major role in his sporting career, albeit luck offset by life-changing misfortunes in his personal life – his first daughter was born with cerebral palsy and died at a young age, and his elder brother was killed in a car crash in 1979.

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One Football Fan’s Fear of Success
by John Crace
Constable, £12.99
Reviewed by Nick Dorrington
From WSC 296 October 2011

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Very soon into their life every Tottenham supporter is indoctrinated in the “Spurs way” and told stories of the brilliance of the Bill Nicholson-led 1961 Double-winning side of Dave Mackay and Danny Blanchflower, Cliff Jones and John White. To correlate this glorious past to teams featuring the likes of Jason Dozzell, Ramon Vega and Timothée Atouba is a task beyond all but the most blindly loyal.

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by Dave Roberts
Bantam Press, £12.99
Reviewed by Roger Titford
From WSC 295 September 2011

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This is a life measured out by football programmes. Roberts is under wifely orders to reduce his collection from 1,134 to 32 and he tells the personal story behind each of his selections. The other 1,102, it is revealed much later, simply go into storage. I was quite worried about them for a while.

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An English Club's Century in Scottish Football
by Tom Maxwell
Northumbria Press, £17.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 294 August 2011

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Ninety per cent of the players in the club's history have come from another country, they play in a stadium – with "a sound system comparable to a Walkman in a bowl of soup" – that is overlooked by grain silos, one of their greatest ever players is the son of a shepherd, they are not allowed to play in their county cup competition for political reasons and they won their first ever football match by a margin of "one goal and two tries to nil".

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Dear WSC
In response to my letter published in WSC 275, Mark Brennan Scott accepts that we send someone to each of the weekend’s Premier League games, to commentate live, but not unreasonably asks whether Match of the Day commentators ever “re-record bits they are unhappy with”. Not exactly, but the beauty of an edit rather than a live game is there is scope for tweaking both the sound and visuals by transmission time. Every now and then, a commentator will, for example, misidentify a goalscorer and then correct themselves, in which case we have been known to remove take one in the edit. I’ve found a copy of a letter I had published in WSC 240 in which I said: “If a commentator gets something wrong at the time we may even spare him his blushes at 10pm by removing the odd word.” That remains the case, but most of the time the commentator’s natural reaction works best. If it takes a couple of replays before they identify a deflection or suspicion of handball, that will nearly always feel more authentic than trying to look too clever after the event. In shortening a game for transmission, we may occasionally “pull up” a replay or remove a few words, but would almost never re-record any section of a commentary unless there’s been a technical problem. Furthermore, in all cases the commentators go home after the post-match interviews and a producer back at base edits the pictures and sound recorded at the time. In early days of the Premier League, only two or three games had multi-camera coverage and commentators present, so there were occasional attempts to add a commentary to single-camera round-up games, for example, for Goal of the Month. However, not every commentator was a convincing thespian and one or two “Le Tissier’s capable of beating three men from here and curling one into the top corner. Oh my word, he has…” moments did slip through. With multi-camera coverage and a commentator at every game, that no longer happens.
Incidentally, call us old-fashioned but there was a degree of pride in this office in MOTD’s recent use of “crashed against the timber” as cited in Steve Whitehead’s letter. Better that – or maybe “hapless custodian” – than some unpleasant modern notion like “bragging rights”.
Paul Armstrong, Programme Editor, BBC Match of the Day

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