I Should Have Been at Work
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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.