The Horse Of The Year Syndrome
Viewing figures for American Football on Channel Four had started to fall, slowly at first, but more and more as the years went on as the eighties gave way to the nineties. There were as many varied reasons for why this happened as there were to why the gridiron gained such popularity throughout Britain in the first place.
“What we gave people was the experience of American Football. There was however, no real loyalty to it,” states Adrian Metcalfe. “The level of viewing was dropping from around 3,000,000 regular viewers to somewhere just short of 1,000,000.”
However despite an obvious drop in the mass-popularity the sport had enjoyed throughout the mid-eighties, there was still a hard-core fan base, which in it’s itself was fairly large. For these persistent fans of the NFL, knowledge had replaced casual interest; understanding had taken over from curiosity. While the National Football League still picked up new fans in the United Kingdom each year, it was at a much steadier pace and failed to compensate for the ones they lost.
“The show had to follow this path. It eventually became a sport for people who were interested in the sport itself,” theorises Metcalfe.
“It just suffered from what I always refer to as ‘The Horse of the Year’ syndrome,” recalls Charles Balchin when asked directly why the drop in viewing figures continued well into the nineties. “When I was a young guy, there were literally millions of people who watched ‘The Horse of the Year’ show. It was on at about nine-twenty-five on BBC One. It was getting around ten to twelve million viewers. It then dropped a little, so the BBC repackaged it and moved it to a different time, like eleven at night. They were then surprised when figures continued to drop, which of course is what happens when you marginalize transmission times.
“That happened with American Football. It started getting moved to later and later, or stranger and weirder times. That inevitably meant there were fewer viewers. Then add to that the fact that there were fewer viewers anyway because some had been put off by the presentation style of The Viscous Boys. It had also been a very yuppee ‘in’ sport, and those things are a bit transient and people move on to other things, so that had a slight dip effect. Then add in the fact that people were getting older. Those who started to watch in the mid-eighties were getting older and having families. There were maybe arguments like ‘There’s only one television in the house and we want to watch....’ whatever. Add all that together, and it went into a free-fall situation until it finally found it’s core audience.”
Some make the explanation much more simple.
“There was bound to be a levelling off period for American Football anyway. Fashions come and go, and that one went, “ Keith Webster states.
“I don’t think the foundations were laid down very solidly,” Nick Halling offers .“You can’t really blame anybody for that. The NFL suddenly found themselves with this explosion of interest abroad which they had no expectation of, and didn’t know how to handle. The game was marketed in this country in such a way as, ‘Wow! Aren’t they big! Wow! Don’t they eat a lot of Burgers! Aren’t they fast and colourful!’ There was no education about the game. There was nothing that said, ‘This is what is actually happening on an American Football field’.”
Due to the lack of education about the game itself, which is only really clear with the benefit of hindsight, once ‘the next best thing’ had arrived, people’s lack of knowledge allowed them to be drawn away all the easier.
“Effectively, when the novelty wore off,” Halling surmises, “the people who tuned in to see these twenty stone giants flying around the place thought ‘Okay, we’ll move on now and get back to our real lives again’. The base was never that sound.”
In fact Nick Halling explained how it is possible to argue that American Football’s decline actually began almost as soon as popularity and interest in the sport was fast approaching it’s peak in the mid-eighties. Although the American Bowl of 1986 between the Bears and the Cowboys was a great success, many people at that stage in the game’s development in the United Kingdom did not really appreciate the difference between a pre-season game and the Super Bowl. When they entered Wembley Stadium on a wet Sunday afternoon in August, they were going to see the star-players they had witnessed on their television sets only six months earlier in the spectacle that was Super Bowl XX.
“It was a rainy day. It was cold, and you know what? The game was pretty dull. Because it was a pre-season game, all the stars that everyone had come to watch had practically all gone by the end of the first quarter,” Halling recalls.
Channel Five producer and director, Peter Hussey, also sites the first American Bowl as a possible turning point in the progression of the game in Great Britain. “I was in that crowd. I stood there for four hours and watched that game. I think what happened was people thought ‘Wow! This game goes on!’. I think that all of a sudden, people began to see it for what it was.”
Another contribution however, if only in a minor way, could be the rebirth and sudden surge of interest in soccer. Although many are quick to dismiss this view as simple coincidence, the fact that interest in the NFL exploded as soccer appeared to implode (around 1985), and similarly began to fade at a much quicker pace at the same time soccer began to climb (around 1992 and 1993) could suggest a stronger link than sheer ‘coincidence‘.
By the time the Premiership was established and considered by most to be ‘the best thing since.…!’, American Football was all but buried in many peoples memories as ‘one of those things I used to watch!’. Ironically, and tragically enough, the beginning of soccer’s climb back to mass-popularity was, in part, an eventual consequence of arguably the worst disaster in recent British sporting history.
On April 15th 1989, at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield (home to Sheffield Wednesday Football Club), ninety-five Liverpool fans were crushed to death during an F.A Cup semi-final game between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. The tragedy occurred in the Leppings Lane end of the stadium as rampant fans crammed into the terrace.
As a result of this, Lord Justice Taylor (a high court judge) was commissioned by the government to launch an inquiry into the disaster, and to ultimately make recommendations to ensure that such an incident would not occur again. This became known as ‘The Taylor Report’.
‘The Taylor Report’ was the ninth investigation into ground safety and ground control at football games in the United Kingdom dating back to the late-1940’s. The Popplewell Inquiry was launched after fifty-six people died in the Bradford City Fire disaster in 1985. In 1972, Lord Wheatley looked into the Ibrox Park disaster when sixty-six fans died as they tried to return into the ground on an ‘exit’ stairway. Even as far back as 1946 there was seemingly sufficient evidence for the need to control crowds and review the safety of football grounds in general when thirty-three fans were crushed to death at Burnden Park (home to Bolton Wanderers), hence came the Moelwyn-Hughes report.
While a large proportion of the previous inquiries had highlighted some of the problems that had ultimately contributed to the Hillsborough disaster, since the 1970’s a darker element had crept into the game. As one decade gave way to another this explosive ingredient was becoming increasingly wide spread, at least on the terraces. Consequently crowd control in the eighties was primarily geared towards halting hooligans.
As the 80s went on, British soccer became increasingly more associated and related with violence, racism, and general hooliganism. As a consequence of this, increased policing took place at soccer matches, while fans were segregated, in some cases by high fencing that more resembled cages than anything else. This was hardly an image that was beneficial for the sport. In fact because of this situation, English clubs were eventually banned from playing in Europe such was the severity of the violence that sometimes followed soccer matches involving teams from the English leagues.
While there was no evidence of ‘crowd trouble’ that Saturday afternoon in mid-April 1989, soccer itself was in danger of becoming a dying animal that was already infested with sick ‘fans’ who took ‘tribal attitudes’ to the games and clashed with opponents with relish at the slightest opportunity.
The first report by Lord Justice Taylor was published in August 1989, and although forty-three recommendations were made, they were mostly aimed at crowd control in general and reducing the capacity of terraces. However the second report several months later was much more condemning of the sport, and got into the belly of the real problems that were eating away at the game.
Lord Justice Taylor sited hooligans and the effect of having to keep fans segregated as problems that needed to be overcome, as well as suggesting new laws to seriously take on the issue of hooliganism and racism in the game. Vast amounts of alcohol being consumed at matches was targeted as a problem, while the players themselves were pulled up on their behaviour and attitudes. Ticket touting was also to become a criminal offense. He even went as far as to criticise the television and newspapers for their attitudes towards the sport. In all Lord Justice Taylor made no less than seventy-six recommendations that were designed to improve the state of soccer in Britain. A part of this was all seated stadiums for all first and second division clubs by the start of the 1994-1995 season, with third and fourth division clubs having to have upgraded by the end of the century.
“For me, the main fall down for soccer was the facilities at the stadium itself, “ Keith Webster reckons in retrospect. “People were paying money, and not getting what they paid for. I remember back in 1986, Pete Rozelle came and stood on the field of Wembley Stadium. The first thing that occurred to him, the first thing he said was, ‘I find this very strange because I am looking at this stadium, and it’s a great stadium, but where we play football, we have seats for everybody.’ It was such a simplistic thing to say, but it was something that we didn’t even complain about at the time.”
The report was potentially about to rip huge holes in the pockets of many soccer clubs up and down the country. With American Football (whether imaginary or not) still poised to move in for the kill on the potential fan base that was seemingly ‘up for grabs’, the Football Association realised it had to clean up it’s act and almost reinvent itself.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer of the time, John Major, granted one-hundred million pounds to assist clubs in redeveloping their grounds over the next five years, with the Football Trust handing over a further forty-million pounds over the same period. As much as this helped, the real saviour however, at least financially, was television, and in particular satellite television and Sky Sports.
Some argue that the Football Association was almost paranoid of live soccer matches being shown regularly on British television, fearing that the option to watch the game unfold in the comfort of one’s own living room would ‘hurt the gates’. Even in the early-eighties when the league was almost forced into entering into it’s first ‘lucrative’ television contract, they were still very decisive on exactly what was shown and when.
However, following ‘The Taylor Report’, and soon after the formation of the Premier League (the old Division one), Sky Sports signed an exclusive deal with the top division to show up to sixty live games to it’s audience. The deal is said to have been worth three-hundred million pounds and was almost five times more than any previous fee paid. The BBC meanwhile gaining limited access to highlights to the newly titled Premier division.
Although the terrestrial audience were restricted in their viewing of the Premiership (due to the exclusivity of the deal by Sky Sports), soccer in general was about to enjoy a renewed ‘buzz’ in the United Kingdom over the coming years. Many public houses up and down the country would show the games live on their premises, and this was also the case when the premiership began to show their own Monday night game. This could be seen as the first time that the F.A. had intentionally set fixtures with television coverage being the primary concern, and from a business point of view (in terms of growing their sport’s popularity), it worked. American Football in the meantime was starting be seen by most as nothing more than a passing fad.
“What we gave people was the experience of American Football. There was however, no real loyalty to it,” states Adrian Metcalfe. “The level of viewing was dropping from around 3,000,000 regular viewers to somewhere just short of 1,000,000.”
However despite an obvious drop in the mass-popularity the sport had enjoyed throughout the mid-eighties, there was still a hard-core fan base, which in it’s itself was fairly large. For these persistent fans of the NFL, knowledge had replaced casual interest; understanding had taken over from curiosity. While the National Football League still picked up new fans in the United Kingdom each year, it was at a much steadier pace and failed to compensate for the ones they lost.
“The show had to follow this path. It eventually became a sport for people who were interested in the sport itself,” theorises Metcalfe.
“It just suffered from what I always refer to as ‘The Horse of the Year’ syndrome,” recalls Charles Balchin when asked directly why the drop in viewing figures continued well into the nineties. “When I was a young guy, there were literally millions of people who watched ‘The Horse of the Year’ show. It was on at about nine-twenty-five on BBC One. It was getting around ten to twelve million viewers. It then dropped a little, so the BBC repackaged it and moved it to a different time, like eleven at night. They were then surprised when figures continued to drop, which of course is what happens when you marginalize transmission times.
“That happened with American Football. It started getting moved to later and later, or stranger and weirder times. That inevitably meant there were fewer viewers. Then add to that the fact that there were fewer viewers anyway because some had been put off by the presentation style of The Viscous Boys. It had also been a very yuppee ‘in’ sport, and those things are a bit transient and people move on to other things, so that had a slight dip effect. Then add in the fact that people were getting older. Those who started to watch in the mid-eighties were getting older and having families. There were maybe arguments like ‘There’s only one television in the house and we want to watch....’ whatever. Add all that together, and it went into a free-fall situation until it finally found it’s core audience.”
Some make the explanation much more simple.
“There was bound to be a levelling off period for American Football anyway. Fashions come and go, and that one went, “ Keith Webster states.
“I don’t think the foundations were laid down very solidly,” Nick Halling offers .“You can’t really blame anybody for that. The NFL suddenly found themselves with this explosion of interest abroad which they had no expectation of, and didn’t know how to handle. The game was marketed in this country in such a way as, ‘Wow! Aren’t they big! Wow! Don’t they eat a lot of Burgers! Aren’t they fast and colourful!’ There was no education about the game. There was nothing that said, ‘This is what is actually happening on an American Football field’.”
Due to the lack of education about the game itself, which is only really clear with the benefit of hindsight, once ‘the next best thing’ had arrived, people’s lack of knowledge allowed them to be drawn away all the easier.
“Effectively, when the novelty wore off,” Halling surmises, “the people who tuned in to see these twenty stone giants flying around the place thought ‘Okay, we’ll move on now and get back to our real lives again’. The base was never that sound.”
In fact Nick Halling explained how it is possible to argue that American Football’s decline actually began almost as soon as popularity and interest in the sport was fast approaching it’s peak in the mid-eighties. Although the American Bowl of 1986 between the Bears and the Cowboys was a great success, many people at that stage in the game’s development in the United Kingdom did not really appreciate the difference between a pre-season game and the Super Bowl. When they entered Wembley Stadium on a wet Sunday afternoon in August, they were going to see the star-players they had witnessed on their television sets only six months earlier in the spectacle that was Super Bowl XX.
“It was a rainy day. It was cold, and you know what? The game was pretty dull. Because it was a pre-season game, all the stars that everyone had come to watch had practically all gone by the end of the first quarter,” Halling recalls.
Channel Five producer and director, Peter Hussey, also sites the first American Bowl as a possible turning point in the progression of the game in Great Britain. “I was in that crowd. I stood there for four hours and watched that game. I think what happened was people thought ‘Wow! This game goes on!’. I think that all of a sudden, people began to see it for what it was.”
Another contribution however, if only in a minor way, could be the rebirth and sudden surge of interest in soccer. Although many are quick to dismiss this view as simple coincidence, the fact that interest in the NFL exploded as soccer appeared to implode (around 1985), and similarly began to fade at a much quicker pace at the same time soccer began to climb (around 1992 and 1993) could suggest a stronger link than sheer ‘coincidence‘.
By the time the Premiership was established and considered by most to be ‘the best thing since.…!’, American Football was all but buried in many peoples memories as ‘one of those things I used to watch!’. Ironically, and tragically enough, the beginning of soccer’s climb back to mass-popularity was, in part, an eventual consequence of arguably the worst disaster in recent British sporting history.
On April 15th 1989, at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield (home to Sheffield Wednesday Football Club), ninety-five Liverpool fans were crushed to death during an F.A Cup semi-final game between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. The tragedy occurred in the Leppings Lane end of the stadium as rampant fans crammed into the terrace.
As a result of this, Lord Justice Taylor (a high court judge) was commissioned by the government to launch an inquiry into the disaster, and to ultimately make recommendations to ensure that such an incident would not occur again. This became known as ‘The Taylor Report’.
‘The Taylor Report’ was the ninth investigation into ground safety and ground control at football games in the United Kingdom dating back to the late-1940’s. The Popplewell Inquiry was launched after fifty-six people died in the Bradford City Fire disaster in 1985. In 1972, Lord Wheatley looked into the Ibrox Park disaster when sixty-six fans died as they tried to return into the ground on an ‘exit’ stairway. Even as far back as 1946 there was seemingly sufficient evidence for the need to control crowds and review the safety of football grounds in general when thirty-three fans were crushed to death at Burnden Park (home to Bolton Wanderers), hence came the Moelwyn-Hughes report.
While a large proportion of the previous inquiries had highlighted some of the problems that had ultimately contributed to the Hillsborough disaster, since the 1970’s a darker element had crept into the game. As one decade gave way to another this explosive ingredient was becoming increasingly wide spread, at least on the terraces. Consequently crowd control in the eighties was primarily geared towards halting hooligans.
As the 80s went on, British soccer became increasingly more associated and related with violence, racism, and general hooliganism. As a consequence of this, increased policing took place at soccer matches, while fans were segregated, in some cases by high fencing that more resembled cages than anything else. This was hardly an image that was beneficial for the sport. In fact because of this situation, English clubs were eventually banned from playing in Europe such was the severity of the violence that sometimes followed soccer matches involving teams from the English leagues.
While there was no evidence of ‘crowd trouble’ that Saturday afternoon in mid-April 1989, soccer itself was in danger of becoming a dying animal that was already infested with sick ‘fans’ who took ‘tribal attitudes’ to the games and clashed with opponents with relish at the slightest opportunity.
The first report by Lord Justice Taylor was published in August 1989, and although forty-three recommendations were made, they were mostly aimed at crowd control in general and reducing the capacity of terraces. However the second report several months later was much more condemning of the sport, and got into the belly of the real problems that were eating away at the game.
Lord Justice Taylor sited hooligans and the effect of having to keep fans segregated as problems that needed to be overcome, as well as suggesting new laws to seriously take on the issue of hooliganism and racism in the game. Vast amounts of alcohol being consumed at matches was targeted as a problem, while the players themselves were pulled up on their behaviour and attitudes. Ticket touting was also to become a criminal offense. He even went as far as to criticise the television and newspapers for their attitudes towards the sport. In all Lord Justice Taylor made no less than seventy-six recommendations that were designed to improve the state of soccer in Britain. A part of this was all seated stadiums for all first and second division clubs by the start of the 1994-1995 season, with third and fourth division clubs having to have upgraded by the end of the century.
“For me, the main fall down for soccer was the facilities at the stadium itself, “ Keith Webster reckons in retrospect. “People were paying money, and not getting what they paid for. I remember back in 1986, Pete Rozelle came and stood on the field of Wembley Stadium. The first thing that occurred to him, the first thing he said was, ‘I find this very strange because I am looking at this stadium, and it’s a great stadium, but where we play football, we have seats for everybody.’ It was such a simplistic thing to say, but it was something that we didn’t even complain about at the time.”
The report was potentially about to rip huge holes in the pockets of many soccer clubs up and down the country. With American Football (whether imaginary or not) still poised to move in for the kill on the potential fan base that was seemingly ‘up for grabs’, the Football Association realised it had to clean up it’s act and almost reinvent itself.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer of the time, John Major, granted one-hundred million pounds to assist clubs in redeveloping their grounds over the next five years, with the Football Trust handing over a further forty-million pounds over the same period. As much as this helped, the real saviour however, at least financially, was television, and in particular satellite television and Sky Sports.
Some argue that the Football Association was almost paranoid of live soccer matches being shown regularly on British television, fearing that the option to watch the game unfold in the comfort of one’s own living room would ‘hurt the gates’. Even in the early-eighties when the league was almost forced into entering into it’s first ‘lucrative’ television contract, they were still very decisive on exactly what was shown and when.
However, following ‘The Taylor Report’, and soon after the formation of the Premier League (the old Division one), Sky Sports signed an exclusive deal with the top division to show up to sixty live games to it’s audience. The deal is said to have been worth three-hundred million pounds and was almost five times more than any previous fee paid. The BBC meanwhile gaining limited access to highlights to the newly titled Premier division.
Although the terrestrial audience were restricted in their viewing of the Premiership (due to the exclusivity of the deal by Sky Sports), soccer in general was about to enjoy a renewed ‘buzz’ in the United Kingdom over the coming years. Many public houses up and down the country would show the games live on their premises, and this was also the case when the premiership began to show their own Monday night game. This could be seen as the first time that the F.A. had intentionally set fixtures with television coverage being the primary concern, and from a business point of view (in terms of growing their sport’s popularity), it worked. American Football in the meantime was starting be seen by most as nothing more than a passing fad.
Gary Imlach became the sole face of American Football on Channel 4 in 1993
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When the 1993 NFL season came into view in September of that year, Gary Imlach took over as full time host of the show from the departed Mick Luckhurst. He was joined by ex-Patriots’, Browns’, and Raiders’ defensive lineman, Bob Golic. In front of a rather bland backdrop, Imlach and Golic brought the 1993 season to the viewer from the studio in Atlanta (Golic would ‘link-up’ from Los Angeles). However over the final weeks of the regular season and throughout the playoffs, Imlach would return to the road to bring a series of extended games for the Channel Four faithful. He would bring the games themselves from the sideline of the battleground, and although no-one knew it at the time, this was a sneak preview into the presentation of the sport over the coming years on Channel Four.
The magazine show that year however, paled in comparison to the likes of it’s predecessors, ‘Red42’ and ’Play Action’. Entitled ‘Trash Talk’ the show was mainly aimed at the youth market, a reflection of which was it’s airing on early Thursday evenings. Fronted by Albert Thompson and Tessa Langmead, the show seemed to mainly revolve around American pop culture and had scary hints of The Viscous Boys.
In 1993, American Football also had a new competitor on the station it had ruled for so long (in terms of sport) in the shape of ‘Football Italia’, which was being aired by Channel Four on Sunday afternoons and was proving very popular. The station had only briefly flirted with soccer coverage in the past, showing a live world cup qualifying match between Australia and Scotland in 1985 (at the same time that the BBC and ITV were locked in talks regarding the rights of soccer), and had also shown Women’s football from 1990-1993.
Now, because of the moves by Sky Sports to wrap up the Premiership (with the BBC getting the highlights package), and ITV scrambling around for whatever they could find (mainly the Division one, two, and three roundup show), Channel Four seemed to sneak the contract to show the Italian league to the United Kingdom. English soccer ace, Paul Gasgoine, had only recently made the move out to Italy fresh from his theatrics for his country in the World Cup competition of 1990 - hosted by Italy. With the premiership in it’s infancy (as well as far from the view of terrestrial audiences - the BBC’s highlights show not withstanding), the Italian league was regarded at the time as the cream of the crop as far as club soccer was concerned. Coincidentally or not, it was in 1993 that the main programme for American Football was moved to eleven p.m. on a Monday evening, leaving it slightly more difficult to ‘stumble on to’ by the casual viewer.
By the time Channel Four was ready to bring the thirteenth consecutive NFL campaign in the autumn of 1994, at a time when the presentation of the sport to British viewers needed desperately rejuvenating, a new production company had entered the fray and eventually succeeded in obtaining the rights to produce American Football for the station. Trans World International (TWI).
They did indeed turn out what many agree to be some of the finest shows concerning American Football broadcasts in the United Kingdom. Ironically enough, they turned out to be Channel Four’s swan song to the sport.
In 1994, Gary Imlach would become the sole face of American Football on British television. He travelled across America bringing the best game of the week in a show entitled ‘The Big Match’. Imlach presented the games from the stadium sidelines themselves as opposed to the confines of a studio as in previous years. Imlach himself would then venture into the locker-room for the instant scoop concerning the showdown for his viewers.
The season also heralded the start of what many British NFL fans consider to be the best magazine show ever dedicated to the sport. A sixty minute, one-hundred mile an hour extravaganza, that aired on a Saturday morning and went by the name of ‘Blitz’.
It is this four year period (September 1994 to January 1998) that is largely seen by many NFL enthusiasts as the best of Channel Four’s coverage. Although each presenter and production team have their own unique and rightful place in the history of the broadcasting of American Football in the United Kingdom, the two shows that TWI offered each week seemed to take the presentation of the sport to a somewhat more credible level. Some see Imlach himself as the main reason for this. He is widely respected by many who have worked with him (‘Blitz’ and ‘The Big Match’ producer, Cathy Jones, once described him as “the best all-round package in terms of a writer, presenter and a producer of a show!”), and many fans simply took to the presenter instantly. Others point to a larger budget and a general slicker approach that TWI offered.
The magazine show the year previous was seen by many as an obvious attempt to arouse interest in the game from the young, and therefore was aimed pretty much at children and so making it unattractive to many fans of the sport.
“They (Cheerleader) were always trying to grow the audience. The mantra always was ‘We must expand the audience!’ as if it were infinitely expandable which it finally proved not to be,” Imlach reckons. “The scheduling didn’t help, but for a long while they made attempts to catch the next generation of American Football fans, thinking the people that had originally tuned in were already caught and were a solid core audience. They felt they needed to go for the kids. My argument always was you wouldn’t make a soccer show specifically for kids. Kids get interested in sport if it’s good enough. For example they will get interested in their dad’s sport. What you need to do is simply make an interesting show, not tailor something specifically to kids which is going to possibly alienate some of your core audience. Make a show that is simply, a good show, and it will attract the biggest audience possible, whether it is thirty year olds or kids. That is what we tried to do with ‘Blitz’.”
Nick Kennerley was another key cog who worked on both ‘The Big Match’ and ‘Blitz’ as the main producer during that four year period, and it would be fair to say that much of the credit for the look of the shows of the era can be laid at his feet. Kennerley is a widely respected multi-camera producer who has events such as live-aid and Wimbledon on his CV. He has also worked on other more diverse sports such as “Kabaddi” (an Indian and Pakistani sport that Channel Four aired in the early nineties). Kennerley was also known as a great ‘magazine show’ producer.
“We made ‘Blitz’ an Americana programme,” Kennerley explains. “Although it was all shot in Atlanta, we didn’t always make it look like it was being shot in Atlanta, but somewhere in America so as to bring the Americaness out of it.”
Gary Imlach offers, “There was an added element of attraction in that, it (‘Blitz’) was an American cultural import and it came with all the baggage of America, and all the paraphernalia that came with America. It enabled us to sample America and American life, as well as their approach to sport without having to swallow it whole. We were able to look at it from a British prospective.”
Travelling around America to achieve this however, was for the majority of the time, impossible to do. ‘The Big Match’ also had to be churned out in time for it’s Monday evening broadcast on Channel Four.
“We’d send Gary to what we thought would be the best game,” long time producer, Jim Storey, remembers. “He would do two sets of links while he was there. One as if that was the best game and one like “Well I’m here, but our main game this week is....”. That way I could sit there on a Sunday afternoon and watch all the games and decide which was the best one to show.”
Of course Storey did not literally watch every single game himself. He and other members of the production team would watch contests that had a higher chance of being a good game, while other ‘lesser’ games were viewed by ‘students’ who were simply paid ‘beer money’ to log them.
“I would put the programme together through the night, and after Gary had done his voice-over in the morning, we would feed it to Channel Four, usually around eleven in the morning (US time) ready for broadcasting in Great Britain on Monday night,” Storey explains.
All this travel across a nation the size of America at times, producing essentially two different shows to strict and tight deadlines could take it’s toll, and explains why it wasn’t always possible to leave Atlanta to cut pieces for ‘Blitz’.
“We were travelling each week to a game (for ‘The Big Match’), which meant leaving on the Saturday, doing the game on the Sunday, and sometimes, if it was a west coast game, not getting back until the early hours, maybe as late as seven or eight in the morning on the redeye,” the former ‘Big Match’ and ‘Blitz’ presenter Gary Imlach recalls. “By the time we’d finished ‘The Big Match’, drawn breath and had a meeting to decide what we were going to do that week and which game we were going to cover the following Sunday, to fly somewhere to shoot links for whatever feature we were doing was physically impossible. We shot most of the links in Atlanta. We just tried to make the most of what was there in Atlanta so as to not advertise the fact that we weren’t moving. We just tried to vary it. To a certain extent we were just using different aspects of America and American backdrops that would exist in any American town.”
Cathy Jones (who joined the TWI production team in Atlanta in 1996), recalled that although occasionally there was time to shoot odd links for ‘Blitz’ in different cities, it was only normally an option if the chosen game was being played in an east coast location.
“If it was an east coast game,” Jones explains, “we would fly straight back (to Atlanta) with the tapes. If it was a west coast game however, we would usually go to a local television station and send back by satellite what we had shot. We would then get back on a plane to come back to Atlanta, because whatever happened, we had to get Gary back by Monday. As soon as he was back in the office, even if it was six in the morning, he would view what we had cut, write his scripts, and then we’d go straight into a voice-over booth. We normally did the links for ‘Blitz’ on a Tuesday afternoon. We would find very unusual locations. For example we once found an area with fantastic graffiti, or there was an old cinema with the old-fashioned lights. It could be anywhere. It was all Americana! The show had to look American, sometimes ‘over-the-top’ American!”
Nick Kennerley shares Jones’ thoughts.
“We wanted the programme to be American, so that you felt like you were in America (while you watched),” Nick Kennerley echoed. “We threw all sorts of elements of Americana into it, but at the same time we only ever veered off the football for a very short time. The heart and soul of the show, was the football.”
TWI’s time covering the sport is a period Kennerley refers to as “one of the most exciting of my life.” He is now one of the biggest Atlanta Falcons fans in the United Kingdom thanks to the four years he spent in Atlanta covering the sport.
“I like the way they put on a good show. I like all the razzmatazz. I like the fact that it (American Football) is such an event! Just being on the road and travelling was fantastic,” Kennerley continues, “The very first game I saw, aside from a few Atlanta Falcons’ pre-season games when we were doing test runs (for the upcoming season in August 1994), was when we went to Three Rivers Stadium.”
Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh was the first location for ‘The Big Match’ which aired for the first time on Channel Four at ten-fifty-five p.m. on Monday 5th September 1994. In that game the Steelers were ready to face-off against the defending champions, Dallas Cowboys. The contest ended 26-9 in the Cowboys’ favour and ended up not actually being the main game shown (a shoot-out between Drew Bledsoe and Dan Marino in a surprisingly muddy Joe Robbie Stadium between the Patriots and the Dolphins made the final cut), but Kennerley still has strong memories of his first real encounter with the National Football League.
“I just walked in and there was about 80,000 people in the stadium, and it was just awesome. It was incredible,” ‘The Big Match’ and ‘Blitz’ producer of four years recalls. “I’ve never forgotten that experience. Walking into a sold-out stadium in such a blue-collar steel working town, and I just thought, ‘This really is fantastic’”
‘Blitz’ aired for the first time on Saturday 10th September 1994 on Channel Four at the tender time of nine-forty-five in the morning. Like other magazine shows before it, it viewed the sport from various different angles, but the flow and look of ‘Blitz’ was very original. Nick Kennerley explained how the show was made towards an audience who might have watched at six or seven on a Friday evening, as opposed to the Saturday morning timeslot it received. In fact the overall look of the show can be laid very much at Kennerley’s feet.
“Nick had some very strong graphic ideas, and ideas on how it (Blitz) should look and flow,” Gary Imlach recalls. “One of the things Nick was good at was giving people room to experiment. There were some young and inexperienced people there (on the production team), who perhaps didn’t have a lot of preconceptions about TV because of the fact they hadn’t got a massive amount of experience, and they were given the freedom to go and cut packages and do stories the way they wanted, under guidance.”
Kennerley was also responsible for recruiting the services of Sarah Young, the woman who created all the artwork for ‘Blitz’ and the ‘Big Match’ that ultimately gave each programme it’s unique look. Because of both her work, and Kennerley’s production skills (not to mention a list of several others’ efforts), the programme was nominated and won several awards for it’s graphics and opening sequences.
Kennerley found with the NFL, the look was slightly easier to achieve as he could be creative in a way that no other sport had or would allow him to be. “I loved the names! The Chicago Bears for example, or the Atlanta Falcons. Such haunting names that sounded much better than Manchester United or Tottenham Hotspur.”
The cost of the graphics and opening sequences for the first series quickly amounted to £35,000, and subsequently Kennerley had already used more money than his Commissioning Editor of Sport, Mike Miller, would have liked. Because of this he had to be inventive when considering further graphic ideas. What Kennerley opted to do was to use the original artwork which Young had painted on to (using a device called a floating point so as to make the illustrations appear 3D) for ‘The Big Match’. He then used a negative effect for ‘Blitz’ by reversing the original artwork (making the background appear black as opposed to white). The effect was subtle, yet masterful. Both shows now had their own identity (although few of us knew why), and it was because of that slight change.
Kennerley would never again be given such a generous budget to spend on graphics and the like, but he steadily built up a wide range of ‘stingers’ and 'bumpers' to use for both shows. While ‘The Big match’ and ‘Blitz’ would alter slightly in appearance over their four-year life span, the general format remained unchanged. A period of ‘stability’ appeared to have reached the broadcasting of American Football in the United Kingdom.
The first year under TWI was a one-year deal. However, following the relative success of the show, and in small part because of the loyalty to the sport that still existed throughout the Channel Four organisation, the show was given a three-year contract extension that would take it to the end of the 1997 NFL campaign. During that time every game would be brought from the road, and ultimately, the live broadcast of the Super Bowl would end each campaign as it had since January 1983.
The magazine show that year however, paled in comparison to the likes of it’s predecessors, ‘Red42’ and ’Play Action’. Entitled ‘Trash Talk’ the show was mainly aimed at the youth market, a reflection of which was it’s airing on early Thursday evenings. Fronted by Albert Thompson and Tessa Langmead, the show seemed to mainly revolve around American pop culture and had scary hints of The Viscous Boys.
In 1993, American Football also had a new competitor on the station it had ruled for so long (in terms of sport) in the shape of ‘Football Italia’, which was being aired by Channel Four on Sunday afternoons and was proving very popular. The station had only briefly flirted with soccer coverage in the past, showing a live world cup qualifying match between Australia and Scotland in 1985 (at the same time that the BBC and ITV were locked in talks regarding the rights of soccer), and had also shown Women’s football from 1990-1993.
Now, because of the moves by Sky Sports to wrap up the Premiership (with the BBC getting the highlights package), and ITV scrambling around for whatever they could find (mainly the Division one, two, and three roundup show), Channel Four seemed to sneak the contract to show the Italian league to the United Kingdom. English soccer ace, Paul Gasgoine, had only recently made the move out to Italy fresh from his theatrics for his country in the World Cup competition of 1990 - hosted by Italy. With the premiership in it’s infancy (as well as far from the view of terrestrial audiences - the BBC’s highlights show not withstanding), the Italian league was regarded at the time as the cream of the crop as far as club soccer was concerned. Coincidentally or not, it was in 1993 that the main programme for American Football was moved to eleven p.m. on a Monday evening, leaving it slightly more difficult to ‘stumble on to’ by the casual viewer.
By the time Channel Four was ready to bring the thirteenth consecutive NFL campaign in the autumn of 1994, at a time when the presentation of the sport to British viewers needed desperately rejuvenating, a new production company had entered the fray and eventually succeeded in obtaining the rights to produce American Football for the station. Trans World International (TWI).
They did indeed turn out what many agree to be some of the finest shows concerning American Football broadcasts in the United Kingdom. Ironically enough, they turned out to be Channel Four’s swan song to the sport.
In 1994, Gary Imlach would become the sole face of American Football on British television. He travelled across America bringing the best game of the week in a show entitled ‘The Big Match’. Imlach presented the games from the stadium sidelines themselves as opposed to the confines of a studio as in previous years. Imlach himself would then venture into the locker-room for the instant scoop concerning the showdown for his viewers.
The season also heralded the start of what many British NFL fans consider to be the best magazine show ever dedicated to the sport. A sixty minute, one-hundred mile an hour extravaganza, that aired on a Saturday morning and went by the name of ‘Blitz’.
It is this four year period (September 1994 to January 1998) that is largely seen by many NFL enthusiasts as the best of Channel Four’s coverage. Although each presenter and production team have their own unique and rightful place in the history of the broadcasting of American Football in the United Kingdom, the two shows that TWI offered each week seemed to take the presentation of the sport to a somewhat more credible level. Some see Imlach himself as the main reason for this. He is widely respected by many who have worked with him (‘Blitz’ and ‘The Big Match’ producer, Cathy Jones, once described him as “the best all-round package in terms of a writer, presenter and a producer of a show!”), and many fans simply took to the presenter instantly. Others point to a larger budget and a general slicker approach that TWI offered.
The magazine show the year previous was seen by many as an obvious attempt to arouse interest in the game from the young, and therefore was aimed pretty much at children and so making it unattractive to many fans of the sport.
“They (Cheerleader) were always trying to grow the audience. The mantra always was ‘We must expand the audience!’ as if it were infinitely expandable which it finally proved not to be,” Imlach reckons. “The scheduling didn’t help, but for a long while they made attempts to catch the next generation of American Football fans, thinking the people that had originally tuned in were already caught and were a solid core audience. They felt they needed to go for the kids. My argument always was you wouldn’t make a soccer show specifically for kids. Kids get interested in sport if it’s good enough. For example they will get interested in their dad’s sport. What you need to do is simply make an interesting show, not tailor something specifically to kids which is going to possibly alienate some of your core audience. Make a show that is simply, a good show, and it will attract the biggest audience possible, whether it is thirty year olds or kids. That is what we tried to do with ‘Blitz’.”
Nick Kennerley was another key cog who worked on both ‘The Big Match’ and ‘Blitz’ as the main producer during that four year period, and it would be fair to say that much of the credit for the look of the shows of the era can be laid at his feet. Kennerley is a widely respected multi-camera producer who has events such as live-aid and Wimbledon on his CV. He has also worked on other more diverse sports such as “Kabaddi” (an Indian and Pakistani sport that Channel Four aired in the early nineties). Kennerley was also known as a great ‘magazine show’ producer.
“We made ‘Blitz’ an Americana programme,” Kennerley explains. “Although it was all shot in Atlanta, we didn’t always make it look like it was being shot in Atlanta, but somewhere in America so as to bring the Americaness out of it.”
Gary Imlach offers, “There was an added element of attraction in that, it (‘Blitz’) was an American cultural import and it came with all the baggage of America, and all the paraphernalia that came with America. It enabled us to sample America and American life, as well as their approach to sport without having to swallow it whole. We were able to look at it from a British prospective.”
Travelling around America to achieve this however, was for the majority of the time, impossible to do. ‘The Big Match’ also had to be churned out in time for it’s Monday evening broadcast on Channel Four.
“We’d send Gary to what we thought would be the best game,” long time producer, Jim Storey, remembers. “He would do two sets of links while he was there. One as if that was the best game and one like “Well I’m here, but our main game this week is....”. That way I could sit there on a Sunday afternoon and watch all the games and decide which was the best one to show.”
Of course Storey did not literally watch every single game himself. He and other members of the production team would watch contests that had a higher chance of being a good game, while other ‘lesser’ games were viewed by ‘students’ who were simply paid ‘beer money’ to log them.
“I would put the programme together through the night, and after Gary had done his voice-over in the morning, we would feed it to Channel Four, usually around eleven in the morning (US time) ready for broadcasting in Great Britain on Monday night,” Storey explains.
All this travel across a nation the size of America at times, producing essentially two different shows to strict and tight deadlines could take it’s toll, and explains why it wasn’t always possible to leave Atlanta to cut pieces for ‘Blitz’.
“We were travelling each week to a game (for ‘The Big Match’), which meant leaving on the Saturday, doing the game on the Sunday, and sometimes, if it was a west coast game, not getting back until the early hours, maybe as late as seven or eight in the morning on the redeye,” the former ‘Big Match’ and ‘Blitz’ presenter Gary Imlach recalls. “By the time we’d finished ‘The Big Match’, drawn breath and had a meeting to decide what we were going to do that week and which game we were going to cover the following Sunday, to fly somewhere to shoot links for whatever feature we were doing was physically impossible. We shot most of the links in Atlanta. We just tried to make the most of what was there in Atlanta so as to not advertise the fact that we weren’t moving. We just tried to vary it. To a certain extent we were just using different aspects of America and American backdrops that would exist in any American town.”
Cathy Jones (who joined the TWI production team in Atlanta in 1996), recalled that although occasionally there was time to shoot odd links for ‘Blitz’ in different cities, it was only normally an option if the chosen game was being played in an east coast location.
“If it was an east coast game,” Jones explains, “we would fly straight back (to Atlanta) with the tapes. If it was a west coast game however, we would usually go to a local television station and send back by satellite what we had shot. We would then get back on a plane to come back to Atlanta, because whatever happened, we had to get Gary back by Monday. As soon as he was back in the office, even if it was six in the morning, he would view what we had cut, write his scripts, and then we’d go straight into a voice-over booth. We normally did the links for ‘Blitz’ on a Tuesday afternoon. We would find very unusual locations. For example we once found an area with fantastic graffiti, or there was an old cinema with the old-fashioned lights. It could be anywhere. It was all Americana! The show had to look American, sometimes ‘over-the-top’ American!”
Nick Kennerley shares Jones’ thoughts.
“We wanted the programme to be American, so that you felt like you were in America (while you watched),” Nick Kennerley echoed. “We threw all sorts of elements of Americana into it, but at the same time we only ever veered off the football for a very short time. The heart and soul of the show, was the football.”
TWI’s time covering the sport is a period Kennerley refers to as “one of the most exciting of my life.” He is now one of the biggest Atlanta Falcons fans in the United Kingdom thanks to the four years he spent in Atlanta covering the sport.
“I like the way they put on a good show. I like all the razzmatazz. I like the fact that it (American Football) is such an event! Just being on the road and travelling was fantastic,” Kennerley continues, “The very first game I saw, aside from a few Atlanta Falcons’ pre-season games when we were doing test runs (for the upcoming season in August 1994), was when we went to Three Rivers Stadium.”
Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh was the first location for ‘The Big Match’ which aired for the first time on Channel Four at ten-fifty-five p.m. on Monday 5th September 1994. In that game the Steelers were ready to face-off against the defending champions, Dallas Cowboys. The contest ended 26-9 in the Cowboys’ favour and ended up not actually being the main game shown (a shoot-out between Drew Bledsoe and Dan Marino in a surprisingly muddy Joe Robbie Stadium between the Patriots and the Dolphins made the final cut), but Kennerley still has strong memories of his first real encounter with the National Football League.
“I just walked in and there was about 80,000 people in the stadium, and it was just awesome. It was incredible,” ‘The Big Match’ and ‘Blitz’ producer of four years recalls. “I’ve never forgotten that experience. Walking into a sold-out stadium in such a blue-collar steel working town, and I just thought, ‘This really is fantastic’”
‘Blitz’ aired for the first time on Saturday 10th September 1994 on Channel Four at the tender time of nine-forty-five in the morning. Like other magazine shows before it, it viewed the sport from various different angles, but the flow and look of ‘Blitz’ was very original. Nick Kennerley explained how the show was made towards an audience who might have watched at six or seven on a Friday evening, as opposed to the Saturday morning timeslot it received. In fact the overall look of the show can be laid very much at Kennerley’s feet.
“Nick had some very strong graphic ideas, and ideas on how it (Blitz) should look and flow,” Gary Imlach recalls. “One of the things Nick was good at was giving people room to experiment. There were some young and inexperienced people there (on the production team), who perhaps didn’t have a lot of preconceptions about TV because of the fact they hadn’t got a massive amount of experience, and they were given the freedom to go and cut packages and do stories the way they wanted, under guidance.”
Kennerley was also responsible for recruiting the services of Sarah Young, the woman who created all the artwork for ‘Blitz’ and the ‘Big Match’ that ultimately gave each programme it’s unique look. Because of both her work, and Kennerley’s production skills (not to mention a list of several others’ efforts), the programme was nominated and won several awards for it’s graphics and opening sequences.
Kennerley found with the NFL, the look was slightly easier to achieve as he could be creative in a way that no other sport had or would allow him to be. “I loved the names! The Chicago Bears for example, or the Atlanta Falcons. Such haunting names that sounded much better than Manchester United or Tottenham Hotspur.”
The cost of the graphics and opening sequences for the first series quickly amounted to £35,000, and subsequently Kennerley had already used more money than his Commissioning Editor of Sport, Mike Miller, would have liked. Because of this he had to be inventive when considering further graphic ideas. What Kennerley opted to do was to use the original artwork which Young had painted on to (using a device called a floating point so as to make the illustrations appear 3D) for ‘The Big Match’. He then used a negative effect for ‘Blitz’ by reversing the original artwork (making the background appear black as opposed to white). The effect was subtle, yet masterful. Both shows now had their own identity (although few of us knew why), and it was because of that slight change.
Kennerley would never again be given such a generous budget to spend on graphics and the like, but he steadily built up a wide range of ‘stingers’ and 'bumpers' to use for both shows. While ‘The Big match’ and ‘Blitz’ would alter slightly in appearance over their four-year life span, the general format remained unchanged. A period of ‘stability’ appeared to have reached the broadcasting of American Football in the United Kingdom.
The first year under TWI was a one-year deal. However, following the relative success of the show, and in small part because of the loyalty to the sport that still existed throughout the Channel Four organisation, the show was given a three-year contract extension that would take it to the end of the 1997 NFL campaign. During that time every game would be brought from the road, and ultimately, the live broadcast of the Super Bowl would end each campaign as it had since January 1983.
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BLITZ - the magazine show everyone loved
1996 saw respected producer, Cathy Jones, join the production team in Atlanta.
“My forte was packaging good high quality features,” Jones explains, “ and that is what Nick wanted me to do, as well as come out (to Atlanta) with a different approach. I think sometimes when you are very, very close to a sport, you can be too literal about it.”
Jones did indeed bring a new angle to the show. She went on to describe her time working on ‘The Big Match’, and ‘Blitz’ as, “two of the happiest years working for TWI,” and claimed she was, “hugely disappointed when it didn’t carry on.”
In fact Nick Kennerley refers to 1996 as arguably the production team’s finest year, in terms of how much fun the unit had. “We were into the second year of a three year deal, the weather was fantastic (in Atlanta that year). There wasn’t a worry in the world!”
While Gary Imlach opted to rent a house nearer the centre of Atlanta, Kennerley and the several Britons who were part of the production team (several of the unit were American workers) lived in rented apartments at a complex outside the city. Although stressing the hard work that was involved, Kennerley remembers, “We (those who staying at the complex) would all usually end up in one room, talking with the occasional gin and tonic!”
“The very first shoot I did was in Baltimore to do the Ravens’ first game,” informed Jones. Cathy told of how there was still amazement (by the Americans) at the fact that there were British television crews at the NFL games producing a show for British TV. So much so that an American sports radio station and even some television stations requested interviews with Jones and other TWI producers. “Baltimore was my first experience with that.”
That first episode of ‘Blitz’ for the 1996 season also demonstrated the lengths this particular production team sometimes went to, to ensure they turned out the best show possible.
“In the closing montage, having done the Baltimore game, we thought it would be funny to use ‘Welcome Home’ by Peters and Lee,” Jones recalls. “There was no way the Americans were going to have that CD in HMV. I actually phoned a colleague of mine in London, who went to the HMV store in Piccadilly Circus, bought the CD and had it sent out by courier for me so we could use it the following week.”
At the end of her first campaign with TWI, Super Bowl XXXI was Jones’ first experience of a Super Bowl, and like many before her had been, she was shocked at the sheer spectacle of the whole event.
“When the Americans do something big, they do something as big as you possibly can,” she explains. “The whole build up to it (the Super Bowl) is far more exciting than say, an F.A. Cup final. You can’t compare it to the World Cup final because it is not an equivalent. But for soccer in England, the equivalent is the F.A. cup final. We (British) do things in a very understated British way, while the Americans go over the top. But at the same time, by doing that, the occasion is incredibly unique.”
Cathy Jones’ addition to the TWI production team was indeed a factor in the eventual overall look of both ‘The Big Match’ and ‘Blitz’. The same may be said of Patrick Strugeon’s arrival in 1997. Both shows seemed to grow in content and perspective as each season went on. It is truly ironic then, that what many feel to be the best coverage by Channel Four was on offer during these lonely years when the National Football League was almost an extinct interest in the United Kingdom. Many people in Great Britain for example, were not even aware that American Football was still being aired by Channel Four.
“What I found useful and gratifying for the last two seasons was when we got the forum going on the Channel Four web-site,” recalls Gary Imlach. With the potential for interaction between the production team in Atlanta and the viewers in Great Britain, the two were brought closer together. “The funny thing about producing a show abroad, is you’re sort of producing a show in a vacuum. You’ve no real way of knowing how the show is going down (in Britain) apart from if you speak to your friends or family, or if you speak to the people at Channel Four in the production company.”
This vacuum was filled with the creation of the forum via the Channel Four web-site.
“I used to check the forum regularly and used to sit there whenever there was a scheduled ‘chat’,” remembers Imlach. “I used to try and sit there for as long as possible and reply to people. Those people who had gone onto the web-site obviously cared a lot about the show and had gone to the trouble of writing in. Whether it was to offer praise, or whether it was criticism, or whatever it was, if people cared that much about the show then I felt it was up to us to give as much feedback as possible.”
One evening however, modern technology seemed to get the better of itself.
“In order to have some security on the site, the Channel Four web-site people gave me a password to type in. When I typed in that password, my name would appear on the screen in a different colour to everyone else’s so people could tell it was me and not just someone sitting at home sending messages as ‘Gary Imlach’,” Imlach tells. “One night though, I don’t know what went wrong with Channel Four’s site, but I typed in the password - that I think at the time was ‘Super Secret User’ - answering someone's query. Instead of coming up as ‘Gary Imlach’, it came up as ‘Super Secret User’. After recovering from it’s glitch, when people typed ‘Super Secret User’, ‘Gary Imlach’ appeared again. Until Channel Four fixed the problem there were half-a-dozen of ‘me’ running around the site spouting all kinds of bizarre opinions.”
Of course one thing many viewers of the show had always tried to figure out was who exactly was Imlach’s favourite team, if he indeed did have one. During an episode of ‘Blitz’ in 1996, Imlach exposed what many could have believed was a sign that the presenter was an Eagles’ fan when he was seen (when the tape was slowed somewhat) punching the air in delight as the Philadelphia Eagles halted the Dallas Cowboys to preserve a hard-earned victory over their rivals.
“The only person who noticed that on the game coverage was me!” Imlach explains. “When I was looking at the tapes to put the voice-over on and such, when they showed the replay of that interception that was returned all the way for a touchdown (I noticed it).”
Faintly in the background, Imlach can be seen punching his fist in the air with joy as the Eagles returned the interception and returned it all the way back to the other end-zone, so sealing the Cowboys’ fate on that particular Sunday.
“I noticed that, and nobody else had. I could have kept quiet about it, but I knew some people suspected I was an Eagles fan so I thought it would be a laugh,” Imlach said. “I guess if you set your stall out to make fun of other people and pick up on things you notice about them, then you’ve got to be prepared to do it to yourself. So having noticed that, I thought, ‘We’ve got to stick this in next week’s Blitz’. We had a lot of ex-players as guests, and they all still cared about the game and their teams to varying degrees,” Imlach recalls. “Drew Pearson though, was such a rabid Cowboys’ fan. He was ‘whooping’ and ‘hollering’ throughout (the game), and it was pretty much a counterpart to him.”
The 1996 AFC Championship game was shown live on Channel Four and was an evening that also presented to all concerned with the broadcast of the match-up with a memorable problem or two. Imlach was joined in the booth at a freezing Foxboro Stadium, Boston, Massachusetts, by Marv Levy.
After a normal start to the game, the floodlights abruptly went out in Foxboro with just under eight minutes left in the first half, with the Patriots leading 7-3 and poised to attempt a field goal. As the officials gathered on the field, TWI left NBC’s coverage and rejoined Imlach in their own booth who in turn quipped to his guest, “I knew we shouldn’t have plugged in that electric kettle Marv!”
“We battled on in the dark. I was keeping an eye on what the teams and the officials were doing,” Kennerley remembered years later. “Nothing seemed to be happening. No-one seemed to know what was going on, and I had a commercial break to get away. They’re quite long in the United Kingdom - about three-and-a-half minutes. So I told Gary that we were about to go to commercial.”
The station stayed with the feed for a few minutes longer, even going to the team of ex-coaches and players that made up NBC’s half-time talk-show, before Imlach finally announced to the Channel Four viewers, “While Robert Kraft (the Patriots’ owner) sends someone out to find a quarter for the electricity meter, we’ll take a break and when we come back hopefully there’ll be some lights on!”
“About ten seconds into the commercial, the lights came back on, the two teams came onto the field, and the Patriots kicked a field goal!” Kennerley recalls. The field goal was consequently shown as a replay when the commercial break on Channel Four was finished.
It is rumoured that ‘the powers that be’ were said to have been watching the American Football shows very closely in their final season throughout 1997. It was beginning to be felt that the programme had run it’s course with the channel. The acquisition of athletics, and other ‘home-grown’ sports seemed to be leaving no place for American Football to survive on the Channel.
The last NFL game to be aired, live or otherwise by Channel Four (although no-one knew it at the time) was Super Bowl XXXII. The contest was broadcast on the evening of Sunday 25th January 1998. The match-up, a showdown between the Green Bay Packers and the Denver Broncos in San Diego, California was one of the finest NFL battles to ever take place and was a truly fitting (if unwitting) swan song for American Football on Channel Four. Denver won their first ever Super Bowl, 31-24, over the defending champion Green Bay Packers. Apart from being a great game, the contest finally saw John Elway (Denver’s long-time quarterback), one of the greatest players in NFL history, finally win a Super Bowl after three humbling defeats in the big game in the late-eighties (all of which were seen by British viewers).
Although he was aware of what a classic game the showdown was, Gary Imlach explained years later how difficult it is to truly appreciate just how big a place in history the game would occupy when you are caught up with the baggage of presenting such a huge live broadcast as the Super Bowl.
“My chief memory of it is perhaps realising that it was an historic game, and realising simultaneously, as we were doing our best, live, to cope with the networks and such, that perhaps we weren’t doing it enough justice,” Imlach recalls. “We weren’t instantly putting it in it’s historical context.”
Imlach went on to explain that broadcasting live NFL games in particular, is sometimes a minefield of errors just waiting to happen on the basis that the American networks didn’t always provide a clean feed in the same way the host network of the World Cup or Olympic games might. Instead of the feed being stripped completely of local adverts and sponsors, the production team, as well as Gary and his respective guests, were sometimes given as little as five seconds notice to speak to the viewers while the American networks ran a string of adverts or endorsements. Add to that the frequent and random nature in which these commercial breaks are taken, principally because of the stop-and-start complexion of the game, as well as the fact that the American networks do not really know exactly when they are going to go to commercial, and it is possible to see why utmost attention has to apply at all times.
“Despite the fact that our truck would have a feed of the talk-back of their (the US network) truck, so that we could hear them counting into a break or out of a break, sometimes they would count back out of a break and we’d think they would be going back to the game and there would be no need for me to talk,” Imlach explained, “But instead they would go to thirty seconds of ‘This game is brought to you in part by.....’, and we would suddenly have to crash into vision. So while history was being made out on the field, although I wasn’t oblivious to it, at least a portion of the brain is caught up coping with all that nonsense.”
Super Bowl XXXII went right down to the wire and left NFL fans in the UK contemplating the best Super Bowl in almost a decade, and thanks to Channel Four (and Sky television if you chose) they had seen it all live, as they had every Super Bowl since January 1983.
However in the summer of 1998, that was all about to change.
“My forte was packaging good high quality features,” Jones explains, “ and that is what Nick wanted me to do, as well as come out (to Atlanta) with a different approach. I think sometimes when you are very, very close to a sport, you can be too literal about it.”
Jones did indeed bring a new angle to the show. She went on to describe her time working on ‘The Big Match’, and ‘Blitz’ as, “two of the happiest years working for TWI,” and claimed she was, “hugely disappointed when it didn’t carry on.”
In fact Nick Kennerley refers to 1996 as arguably the production team’s finest year, in terms of how much fun the unit had. “We were into the second year of a three year deal, the weather was fantastic (in Atlanta that year). There wasn’t a worry in the world!”
While Gary Imlach opted to rent a house nearer the centre of Atlanta, Kennerley and the several Britons who were part of the production team (several of the unit were American workers) lived in rented apartments at a complex outside the city. Although stressing the hard work that was involved, Kennerley remembers, “We (those who staying at the complex) would all usually end up in one room, talking with the occasional gin and tonic!”
“The very first shoot I did was in Baltimore to do the Ravens’ first game,” informed Jones. Cathy told of how there was still amazement (by the Americans) at the fact that there were British television crews at the NFL games producing a show for British TV. So much so that an American sports radio station and even some television stations requested interviews with Jones and other TWI producers. “Baltimore was my first experience with that.”
That first episode of ‘Blitz’ for the 1996 season also demonstrated the lengths this particular production team sometimes went to, to ensure they turned out the best show possible.
“In the closing montage, having done the Baltimore game, we thought it would be funny to use ‘Welcome Home’ by Peters and Lee,” Jones recalls. “There was no way the Americans were going to have that CD in HMV. I actually phoned a colleague of mine in London, who went to the HMV store in Piccadilly Circus, bought the CD and had it sent out by courier for me so we could use it the following week.”
At the end of her first campaign with TWI, Super Bowl XXXI was Jones’ first experience of a Super Bowl, and like many before her had been, she was shocked at the sheer spectacle of the whole event.
“When the Americans do something big, they do something as big as you possibly can,” she explains. “The whole build up to it (the Super Bowl) is far more exciting than say, an F.A. Cup final. You can’t compare it to the World Cup final because it is not an equivalent. But for soccer in England, the equivalent is the F.A. cup final. We (British) do things in a very understated British way, while the Americans go over the top. But at the same time, by doing that, the occasion is incredibly unique.”
Cathy Jones’ addition to the TWI production team was indeed a factor in the eventual overall look of both ‘The Big Match’ and ‘Blitz’. The same may be said of Patrick Strugeon’s arrival in 1997. Both shows seemed to grow in content and perspective as each season went on. It is truly ironic then, that what many feel to be the best coverage by Channel Four was on offer during these lonely years when the National Football League was almost an extinct interest in the United Kingdom. Many people in Great Britain for example, were not even aware that American Football was still being aired by Channel Four.
“What I found useful and gratifying for the last two seasons was when we got the forum going on the Channel Four web-site,” recalls Gary Imlach. With the potential for interaction between the production team in Atlanta and the viewers in Great Britain, the two were brought closer together. “The funny thing about producing a show abroad, is you’re sort of producing a show in a vacuum. You’ve no real way of knowing how the show is going down (in Britain) apart from if you speak to your friends or family, or if you speak to the people at Channel Four in the production company.”
This vacuum was filled with the creation of the forum via the Channel Four web-site.
“I used to check the forum regularly and used to sit there whenever there was a scheduled ‘chat’,” remembers Imlach. “I used to try and sit there for as long as possible and reply to people. Those people who had gone onto the web-site obviously cared a lot about the show and had gone to the trouble of writing in. Whether it was to offer praise, or whether it was criticism, or whatever it was, if people cared that much about the show then I felt it was up to us to give as much feedback as possible.”
One evening however, modern technology seemed to get the better of itself.
“In order to have some security on the site, the Channel Four web-site people gave me a password to type in. When I typed in that password, my name would appear on the screen in a different colour to everyone else’s so people could tell it was me and not just someone sitting at home sending messages as ‘Gary Imlach’,” Imlach tells. “One night though, I don’t know what went wrong with Channel Four’s site, but I typed in the password - that I think at the time was ‘Super Secret User’ - answering someone's query. Instead of coming up as ‘Gary Imlach’, it came up as ‘Super Secret User’. After recovering from it’s glitch, when people typed ‘Super Secret User’, ‘Gary Imlach’ appeared again. Until Channel Four fixed the problem there were half-a-dozen of ‘me’ running around the site spouting all kinds of bizarre opinions.”
Of course one thing many viewers of the show had always tried to figure out was who exactly was Imlach’s favourite team, if he indeed did have one. During an episode of ‘Blitz’ in 1996, Imlach exposed what many could have believed was a sign that the presenter was an Eagles’ fan when he was seen (when the tape was slowed somewhat) punching the air in delight as the Philadelphia Eagles halted the Dallas Cowboys to preserve a hard-earned victory over their rivals.
“The only person who noticed that on the game coverage was me!” Imlach explains. “When I was looking at the tapes to put the voice-over on and such, when they showed the replay of that interception that was returned all the way for a touchdown (I noticed it).”
Faintly in the background, Imlach can be seen punching his fist in the air with joy as the Eagles returned the interception and returned it all the way back to the other end-zone, so sealing the Cowboys’ fate on that particular Sunday.
“I noticed that, and nobody else had. I could have kept quiet about it, but I knew some people suspected I was an Eagles fan so I thought it would be a laugh,” Imlach said. “I guess if you set your stall out to make fun of other people and pick up on things you notice about them, then you’ve got to be prepared to do it to yourself. So having noticed that, I thought, ‘We’ve got to stick this in next week’s Blitz’. We had a lot of ex-players as guests, and they all still cared about the game and their teams to varying degrees,” Imlach recalls. “Drew Pearson though, was such a rabid Cowboys’ fan. He was ‘whooping’ and ‘hollering’ throughout (the game), and it was pretty much a counterpart to him.”
The 1996 AFC Championship game was shown live on Channel Four and was an evening that also presented to all concerned with the broadcast of the match-up with a memorable problem or two. Imlach was joined in the booth at a freezing Foxboro Stadium, Boston, Massachusetts, by Marv Levy.
After a normal start to the game, the floodlights abruptly went out in Foxboro with just under eight minutes left in the first half, with the Patriots leading 7-3 and poised to attempt a field goal. As the officials gathered on the field, TWI left NBC’s coverage and rejoined Imlach in their own booth who in turn quipped to his guest, “I knew we shouldn’t have plugged in that electric kettle Marv!”
“We battled on in the dark. I was keeping an eye on what the teams and the officials were doing,” Kennerley remembered years later. “Nothing seemed to be happening. No-one seemed to know what was going on, and I had a commercial break to get away. They’re quite long in the United Kingdom - about three-and-a-half minutes. So I told Gary that we were about to go to commercial.”
The station stayed with the feed for a few minutes longer, even going to the team of ex-coaches and players that made up NBC’s half-time talk-show, before Imlach finally announced to the Channel Four viewers, “While Robert Kraft (the Patriots’ owner) sends someone out to find a quarter for the electricity meter, we’ll take a break and when we come back hopefully there’ll be some lights on!”
“About ten seconds into the commercial, the lights came back on, the two teams came onto the field, and the Patriots kicked a field goal!” Kennerley recalls. The field goal was consequently shown as a replay when the commercial break on Channel Four was finished.
It is rumoured that ‘the powers that be’ were said to have been watching the American Football shows very closely in their final season throughout 1997. It was beginning to be felt that the programme had run it’s course with the channel. The acquisition of athletics, and other ‘home-grown’ sports seemed to be leaving no place for American Football to survive on the Channel.
The last NFL game to be aired, live or otherwise by Channel Four (although no-one knew it at the time) was Super Bowl XXXII. The contest was broadcast on the evening of Sunday 25th January 1998. The match-up, a showdown between the Green Bay Packers and the Denver Broncos in San Diego, California was one of the finest NFL battles to ever take place and was a truly fitting (if unwitting) swan song for American Football on Channel Four. Denver won their first ever Super Bowl, 31-24, over the defending champion Green Bay Packers. Apart from being a great game, the contest finally saw John Elway (Denver’s long-time quarterback), one of the greatest players in NFL history, finally win a Super Bowl after three humbling defeats in the big game in the late-eighties (all of which were seen by British viewers).
Although he was aware of what a classic game the showdown was, Gary Imlach explained years later how difficult it is to truly appreciate just how big a place in history the game would occupy when you are caught up with the baggage of presenting such a huge live broadcast as the Super Bowl.
“My chief memory of it is perhaps realising that it was an historic game, and realising simultaneously, as we were doing our best, live, to cope with the networks and such, that perhaps we weren’t doing it enough justice,” Imlach recalls. “We weren’t instantly putting it in it’s historical context.”
Imlach went on to explain that broadcasting live NFL games in particular, is sometimes a minefield of errors just waiting to happen on the basis that the American networks didn’t always provide a clean feed in the same way the host network of the World Cup or Olympic games might. Instead of the feed being stripped completely of local adverts and sponsors, the production team, as well as Gary and his respective guests, were sometimes given as little as five seconds notice to speak to the viewers while the American networks ran a string of adverts or endorsements. Add to that the frequent and random nature in which these commercial breaks are taken, principally because of the stop-and-start complexion of the game, as well as the fact that the American networks do not really know exactly when they are going to go to commercial, and it is possible to see why utmost attention has to apply at all times.
“Despite the fact that our truck would have a feed of the talk-back of their (the US network) truck, so that we could hear them counting into a break or out of a break, sometimes they would count back out of a break and we’d think they would be going back to the game and there would be no need for me to talk,” Imlach explained, “But instead they would go to thirty seconds of ‘This game is brought to you in part by.....’, and we would suddenly have to crash into vision. So while history was being made out on the field, although I wasn’t oblivious to it, at least a portion of the brain is caught up coping with all that nonsense.”
Super Bowl XXXII went right down to the wire and left NFL fans in the UK contemplating the best Super Bowl in almost a decade, and thanks to Channel Four (and Sky television if you chose) they had seen it all live, as they had every Super Bowl since January 1983.
However in the summer of 1998, that was all about to change.
