blades blog Imagine my surprise...

Posted: March 1st 2010
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So there I am, sitting watching the tele on a Saturday night, 50p bottle of Stella from Morrisons in my hand (hey, what a bargain) and the drivel that passes for All Star Family Fortunes is in full flow.

The Blades have delighted and frustrated in one sweet afternoon but only just despatched the Mariner’s Pilgrims with a daft “He’s BEHIND you!!” panto goal. These are sublime football moments which seem at odds with the ordinarily painstaking work it takes to carve out a mere sniff of a chance of a goal, let alone have one fall in your lap.

Anyway, as the diminutive Ronnie Corbett would say, I digress. Vernon ‘sex text’ Kay (“such a shame, such a nice lad”, says my mum) cracks on with the programme in which he asks a series of z-list showbiz families a series of questions to which there are the five most popular answers up on an electronic scoreboard.  Whichever contestant picks the most popular answer their family gets to try and guess the rest. I can recommend the board game, especially the battery-operated buzzer, but I’d rather rustle up a dish of sautéed nail clippings and dog hairs, accompanied by a saliva jus, than sit through the family fun fest that is this Saturday night TV show.

Anyway . . . the key phrase in the previous paragraph reader is that of “five most popular answers” gleaned from the 100 people who have usually been surveyed. Remember that please.

As cheeky chappie Vernon curls his vowels through another question and looks hilariously bemused to the camera designed to catch his hilariously bemused look, my usually steady pouring hand becomes momentarily wobbly leaving the head on my pint of Kelham Island Easy Rider a might too frothy for my liking. (Despite being a blonde, full-bodied ale at 4.3% with a lingering fruity aftertaste, the Easy is of course, the younger sister of the multi-award winning Pale Rider, which, at 5.3% is an altogether different proposition for a Saturday night TV marathon and would probably render the twilight Match of the Day a shade blurry).

Anyway, what’s caught my attention is a Family Fortunes sports question which went something like this:

Vernon: “We asked 100 people to name a football team which plays in red?”

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz . . .(Sound of buzzer not mother falling asleep, although by this stage she had indeed assumed the position and was slumped alarmingly in the rocker).

Contestant one: “Manchester United!”

Vernon: “We asked for a football team which plays in red. You said Manchester United, Let’s see if our audience agrees with you. Our survey said . . . . “

Of course the world’s most marketable and branded corporate face of the beautiful game was going to be the top answer – Christ, the equivalent show watched in a field by a sheep farmer in Southern Patagonia  was going to come up with that answer but by now I’m shouting at the tele, determined, as any self-respecting sporto would be, that I will have all five answers before Vernon gets a chance to ask the rest of the family what the other four answers might be. Don’t ask me who the families were because a) it doesn’t matter and b) life is woefully short.

“Liverpool, Arsenal,” I shout in rapid fire.

“Liverpool, “ say Family A before drying up.

“Arsenal,” say family B before also admitting defeat.

Vernon turns to big screen to find out what the last two answers were for the five most popular football teams playing in red. Answer five is, somewhat strangely, England. Personally, I’d have gone through a host of other clubs before arriving at the national team’s iconic alternate strip. The final and fourth most popular answer, reveals Vernon, is . . . . .”Sheffield United!”.

Whoops of delight from the sofa, rapid texts around the world in celebration of this fact and much beating and bearing of chests chez south-west Sheffield contrasting sharply with the anti-climactic, brushwood silence in the studio. The usual audience chorus of “aaaah yes, of course,” replaced with a kind of mumbling puzzlement.

Nevertheless, ring the bells, sound the alarms, spread the message to the far-flung corners of the world, or at least around South Yorkshire. There it was, on Vern’s giant screen, the names Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Sheffield United and England – by far and away, judged by a highly intuitive and intelligent ABC1 socio-economic ITV, Saturday night viewing audience, as the five most important red-shirted football teams in the country, with England a lowly fifth behind the Blades.

What a result, what a night, stick another pie in the oven mother and hold on to your curlers, I feel another beer coming on.