Armchair Nation (50 page)

‘Who is Gazza?' asked Mr Justice Harman in the high court that September, after Paul Gascoigne Ltd had applied for an injunction against an unauthorised biography. ‘Paul Gascoigne is a very well-known footballer,' explained his barrister, Michael Silverleaf. ‘As a result of his performance [in the World Cup] he has come to be very greatly recognised by the public in this country.' After establishing that it was possible that television had made Gazza even more famous than the Duke of Wellington after Waterloo, the judge concluded that, like the duke, Gazza had no legal protection against unwelcome biographers. ‘Gascoigne became Gazza at the moment of the tears,' reflected Anthony Giddens, professor of sociology at Cambridge, in an essay in the
Times Higher Education Supplement
. ‘Gazza's tears are not a nostalgic and self-pitying reaction to past glories lost … [they] are simultaneously comforting and disturbing, symbolising real achievement in a puzzling wider world in which, however, England's role has become distinctly problematic.'
¹⁵

Football was not, of course, reinvented in one moment, and made the subject of such ambitious cultural semiotics, because of a single match on television. It had been gradually gaining middle-class viewers in the postwar era with the growth of TV coverage, while football grounds had remained mainly the preserve of the working
classes. One of BBC2's most popular programmes in the 1960s was
Match of the Day
, which Mary Whitehouse stayed up every Saturday night to watch after her husband and two sons had gone to bed. Televised football developed its own visual and verbal lexicon which made it ever more unlike the experience of watching on the terraces. When the BBC first used the slow-motion ‘action replay' after a near miss in the opening match of the 1966 World Cup between England and Uruguay, the duty office was inundated with calls asking if the match was live or recorded. The World Cup Final of that year gained the biggest audience in British television history: more than 32 million, an even more impressive figure when one considers that the game involved only one of the home nations and that it is probably an underestimate, since the collective watching in public places that occurs during big sports games does not register well in ratings systems.

But some worried that television was colonising and transforming British football just as it had done with American football. The ex-Spurs player Danny Blanchflower sincerely believed that televised football should be straight reportage, and that a boring match should be edited into equally boring highlights so as not to mislead the viewer. ‘Television is the Moloch of the age, into whose vast, undifferentiated maw anything and everything can disappear,' agreed the journalist Brian Glanville. Editing was turning football into ‘something other than it is, vulgarising it into a thing of goals, shots and goalmouth escapes'. And yet televised football could animate viewers like no other kind of television. When Charlie George struck the winning goal for Arsenal in the 1971 FA Cup Final, five-year-old Jason Cowley was returning from the sweet shop with his sister and walking past a window in a Harlow street. ‘As the ball hit the back of the net it was as if a bomb had exploded inside the house, scattering bodies,' Cowley wrote later. ‘If the windows weren't already open I'd have sworn the sound of the celebrations inside would have blown out the glass.'
¹⁶

While the new scourge of hooliganism in the 1970s put many people off attending matches, the parallel universe of televised football achieved a new realism. Electronic cameras meant matches could
be snappily edited, and on a colour set you could see everything beautifully, from churned-up goalmouths to the grass changing colour from late summer to spring. The
Match of the Day
presenter, Jimmy Hill, addressed the camera like an Open University lecturer, a textual critic revealing the game's subtext, spotlighting a key player, passing judgement on whether a goal was offside and castigating ungentle-manly play. In their early work of media studies,
Reading Television
(1978), John Fiske and John Hartley noted that the programme abstracted football from its open-air, partisan, proletarian messiness. ‘
Match of the Day
is not football,' they wrote, ‘in the way that
Come Dancing
is not dancing.'
¹⁷

Televised football brought in new, literate fans. Standing in for Clive James as the
Observer
's television critic in August 1978, Martin Amis wrote about a whole weekend watching football, from
Football Focus
on Saturday lunchtime to
The Big Match
on Sunday afternoon. ‘Intellectual football-lovers are a beleaguered crew,' he argued later, ‘despised by intellectuals and football-lovers alike, who regard our addiction as affected, pseudo-proletarian, even faintly homosexual. We have adapted to this; we keep ourselves to ourselves – oh, how we have to cringe and hide!'
¹⁸
This confession appeared in the
London Review of Books
. Its editor Karl Miller – who, along with John Moynihan had been part of a group of trailblazing middle-class Sunday footballers, made up of writers, artists, actors and journalists, who had begun playing on Hyde Park in the late 1950s – often gave intellectuals like A. J. Ayer and Hans Keller the space to write about their fandom. So when Sky, buoyed by the success of the 1990 World Cup, latched on to televised football as a way of selling dishes, it was drawing on a slightly subterranean, cross-class interest in the game that had been developing, with interruptions, since at least the 1960s.

Sky had noticed the sharp rise in dish sales when they broadcast the Mike Tyson–Frank Bruno fight in February 1989, and England's
progress to the Cricket World Cup final in March 1992. But as ITV's Greg Dyke prophesied, Britain's national game would be ‘the biggest dish-driver of the lot'.
¹⁹
In May 1992 Sky paid £304 million, more than ten times the current rate, for the rights to televise live games in the newly formed Premier League. On the first Sky ‘Super Sunday' that August, a single match between Nottingham Forest and Liverpool was padded out into five hours of television. Pitch inspections and shots of the referee getting changed in his dressing-room preceded the game. During it, pitchside cameras raced down the touch-line with wingers or showed managers screaming ineffectually at players. After it, ex-footballer experts used electronic chalkboards to show how moves had developed. The Monday night game, inspired by the Monday night American football on US television, employed sumo wrestlers dressed in team colours, and cheerleaders, the ‘Sky Strikers', as half-time distractions.

The televised Premier League became turbo capitalism in excel-sis, a hyper-mercenary trade in which a small coterie of clubs secured much of the TV money for themselves and then proceeded to earn even more through merchandise and stock market flotations. Oddly, though, as clubs became detached from their localities, ruled by offshore interests and money markets, football's emotional landscape was enriched. This new mood had been anticipated in the 1990 World Cup, even before Gazza's tears. The BBC's opening credits for its coverage had shown slow motion, balletic images of footballers, including the agonised ecstasy of Marco Tardelli's goal celebration in the 1982 World Cup Final, over Luciano Pavarotti singing ‘Nessun Dorma' from
Turandot
. New Order and the England squad's 1990 World Cup song, ‘World in Motion', was a similarly heady concoction of optimism and nostalgia, which began with a sample from Kenneth Wolstenholme's BBC commentary at the end of the 1966 World Cup Final.

As the final goal went in, Wolstenholme had said: ‘And here comes Hurst! He's got – some people are on the pitch. They think it's all over – it is now! It's four!' These words did not resonate immediately with viewers, no doubt because they were drowned out by millions of living room cheers, which was probably just as well, since they
inconveniently drew attention to the fact that the goal should have been disallowed because there were spectators on the field. It was only when the whole game was repeated on BBC2 in August 1966 that their concision and neatness caught the public mood, and continued to do so over the years as the nation rued its failure to repeat its only footballing triumph. As a piece of Wolstenholme commentary, it was atypical. He was best known for his clipped RAF tones and meaningful silences, for he believed that words should merely annotate what was on screen. Wolstenholme's standard response when a player scored was ‘it's a goal', a phrase so familiar to 1960s TV viewers that the Beatles, none of whom were football fans, sampled it on a loop for an alternative mix of the song ‘Glass Onion', which later appeared on
Anthology 3
.

Over on ITV, only about 4 million viewers heard Hugh Johns's more prosaic celebration of the winning goal and Hurst's hat trick: ‘Geoff Hurst goes forward. He might make it three. He has! He has! And that's it, that's it!' But Johns's voluble commentaries, delivered in a rich voice honed in theatre rep, coarsened by chain smoking and lubricated with Brain's Bitter, became the default style. David Coleman, who replaced Wolstenholme as the main BBC commentator for the 1970 World Cup, was similarly excitable, calling out players' names in ascending pitch and then, when the goal went in, finishing with a crescendo ‘1–0!' Sky's football commentary, a torrent of atmospheric shouting and interjections by ‘summarisers', followed this school of commentary to its outer edges. Towards the end of his life, Wolstenholme became sick of the ‘demeaning trivia' of the commentators, and would turn the sound down when watching a game.
²⁰
But the best commentary, as his enduring eight words in 1966 showed, could provide a collective, emotional response to an event that lingered long in the memory.

Just as Sky began its Premier League coverage, Nick Hornby published his affecting and influential book about football fandom,
Fever Pitch
. Hornby's contention that ‘the natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score' contrasted eloquently with satellite football's hype.
²¹
Grassroots fanzines and a raft
of Hornby-influenced fan memoirs recalled the terraces of the 1970s as a sensual world of cigarette smoke, proximate bodies and BO, an implicit retort to the touchless, passive voyeurism of televised football. The Sky deal had also reinstated
Match of the Day
, as the BBC won back from ITV the rights to broadcast highlights, and a wave of nostalgia greeted the return of this late Saturday night fixture. In the mid 1990s the BBC broadcast
Match of the Seventies
, highlights of old editions of
Match of the Day
intercut with evocative 1970s music: a fascinating social document resurrecting all kinds of lost phenomena, from footballers' bushy sideburns to the standing crowds swaying like a single organism. Football, formerly associated with a lumpen masculinity, was now a way for men to think lyrically about longing, loss and the local and familial ties unravelled by globalisation and the free market. It became what literary theorists call a reverse discourse, a critique of the dominant culture that also validated it, for it allowed fans to carry on watching Premier League football on satellite television without feeling part of the relentless mercantilism of the modern game.

The received wisdom for years had been that television was slowly killing the live game. When
Match of the Day
began in August 1964, it was broadcast on BBC2 because the Football League was worried about its effect on crowd numbers, and only agreed to it being broadcast on a channel not then available outside London and which hardly anyone was watching. There had been a long-term decline in attendance since the late 1940s and a particularly sharp fall with the rise of colour television in the early 1970s. The historical pattern seemed clear, but the received wisdom turned out to be wrong. In the new satellite football era, match attendances remained buoyant as fans seemed quite prepared to pay inflated prices to watch live games they could see at home much more cheaply, or even to do both and pay twice over for the same product. As customers, they were as irrational and captive as the typical Hornbyesque narrator of the football fan memoir.

Satellite football created a new way of watching television. Walking through a town centre on Sunday afternoons or Monday evenings, you would see the coloured chalkboards outside pubs advertising
live football and hear the mingled sounds of pub cheers and Martin Tyler's Sky commentary wafting through the open air. Enormous BBC plasma screens, twenty-five metres square, grew on stilts in city squares, where crowds would congregate for matches. Goal celebrations became part of public life, and a news footage cliché. A reporter would be sent to a bar for a big game, with the camera trained not on the screen but the supporters, showing them edging towards the screen, open-mouthed in anticipation at a goal chance and then erupting with joy or throwing back their heads in despair. Sometimes they would show the more subdued groans when the other side scored. Rarely in modern times had public life been given over to such self-abandoning extremes of anguish and euphoria.