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Throughout the day, as well as the football’s full lower league programme and horseracing results from six courses, a host of channels and stations were throwing in for good measure the European soccer live biggies for Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland, New Zealand and Australia’s rugby openers from Marseille and Lyon and, of course, all through the weekend on BBC2 the Walker Cuppers were clobbering the little dimpled onion all over the glorious Royal County Down golf course. Fore and aft of the Saturday spectaculars, on Friday and Sunday, there was heaps more of the same battering at your screens, including county cricket, rugby league, the major athletics meet in Zurich, world championship boxing and possibly the season’s decisively seminal motor-race Grand Prix from Monza.
Nicely, such a babbling babel of broadcasting marked notable anniversaries. The baby’s come a long way. The world and his wife surely know by now that 2007 celebrates the 80th birthday of live commentaries in Britain. In a ten-month baptismal splurge in 1927, ‘wireless’ pioneers intrepidly covered just about the lot for the first time, from Twickenham rugby (England v. Wales, 15 January 1927) to Albert Hall boxing (Teddy Baldock v. Willie Smith, 6 October). Ten years later it was television’s turn. In fact, this very Sunday marks the precise 70 years since BBC staged a trial television relay of a football match at Highbury (nearest place to the studios at Alexandra Palace) when Arsenal’s first team played its second XI; guinea-pig commentator was John Snagge. It was successful enough for them to broadcast parts of the FA Cup final later that season between Preston North End and Huddersfield Town — although the first Wembley final to be televised in its entirety was Burnley v. Charlton Athletic 60 years ago on 26 April 1947. The camera team had practised by covering two earlier matches that season — Charlton v. Blackburn Rovers, and non-League Tooting & Mitcham’s game at Barnet. I reflected fondly on the latter little trailblazers when, out of the blue from the midst of the bigtime blanket coverage all round, Sky Sports still found time on Saturday morning to transmit lowly Barnet’s match against Dagenham & Redbridge.
During ITV’s drama from Monza on Sunday I thought, too, of BBC television’s first attempt at motor-racing in the summer of 1947 on the airfield runways at Silverstone. They sent game-for-anything Max Robertson to cover it. As the two ace drivers, Raymond Mays (Maserati) and Giuseppe Farina (Ferrari), diced wheel-to-wheel, good Max breathlessly identified ‘Maserati in his Mays and Ferrari in his Farina’. They let him stick to tennis after that.
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