The Big Match Clive clive on tv

A lady sat on the terrace at Exeter City the other night asked me if I knew where the toilets were. I did, they were directly behind where I was standing watching QPR make surprisingly light work of the home team. I pointed them out to her, wished her the best of luck as is customary when sending somebody off into hell, and continued to watch the match.

Now if any of you are reading this thinking: “what an idiot, why didn’t he follow her in and ask if he could watch?” then the new Football League Show on BBC1, Saturday nights 11.20pm, is for you. It is not yet clear whether we are going to get a clip of Kate Bosworth on the toilet midway through the League Two highlights package every week, or whether perhaps the BBC will use a different actress each time, but even if it was just a one off it further underlined just how much better the BBC is at presenting sport than ITV.

When somebody at ITV flicks the wrong switch midway through football you miss a crucial goal in an FA Cup Fifth Round Merseyside derby replay right at the death of extra time while they sell you orange flavoured Tic Tacs. When the same thing happens on the BBC you get a blonde woman taking her knickers off during Torquay v Chesterfield highlights. It was just one of a million different ways the Beeb’s new baby annihilated its ITV predecessor.

As I have said before, I come at any review involving ITV from a position of terrible bias which I always feel obliged to flag up right at the start.. ITV is trash television for stupid people in my opinion. I bloody hate it.. This is a channel losing money hand over fist and attempting to redress that by cutting back on making quality drama that people want to watch in favour of TV’s Naughtiest Blunders with Steve Penk. A channel that gives Simon Cowell, Ant and Dec and Michael Barrymore a chance to spread their forces of considerable evil and a channel that has always remorselessly ruined football coverage with advert breaks, terrible guests, terrible presenters and Clive bloody Tyldesley in the commentary box.

The merciful end for their Sunday morning Football League highlights package, you know the one they once halved in length and used to show only the “best of” the goals from the weekend so they could screen the Power Rangers movie, came in May. The BBC have taken it on, and I mean that in every sense of the term, because rather than maroon it among the kids programmes at various schedule slots on a Sunday morning the programme is now twice as long, in a regular (if rather late) slot, with plenty of promotion, and every goal available free on the BBC website a day or so after the game.

They have abandoned the idea of having a presenter at the main match introducing extended highlights as the teams emerge and then cueing in the rest of the highlights with pieces to camera from extravagant angles around the ground and gone for the more tried and tested studio approach with guests. They have not been lazy though and just slung three people onto the existing Match of the Day set – the League Show has its own two level studio with lots of old brick effect and big windows, like one of those trendy bars I end up being dragged into on nights out before faking a phone call and leaving.

Steve Claridge looks like he is going to be the regular guest, and that is not a particularly good thing. When Claridge is telling funny stories about playing for a million different clubs or taking a doctor’s note to John Beck saying a heart condition prevented him taking part in the infamous pre-match Cambridge ice baths he’s very good. When he is giving an opinion on the game he comes across as condescending and, at times, downright rude when somebody holds a different one from himself. When sitting next to articulate, witty and knowledgeable people like Guillem Balague or Gabriele Marcotti on Five Live’s Monday Night Club he is, to be blunt, cringeworthy in his approach to conversing with football people who have never actually played football.

Alongside Claridge for the first show on Saturday, August 8, was Ian Holloway and I very much like the idea of getting a manager or player in from a game that has taken place earlier in the day. It’s an approach that works very well on Goals on Sunday on Sky and will work here as well if they persist with it. Obviously location will hinder the choice, Holloway was an obvious candidate as a funny man who had played round the corner at Loftus Road earlier in the day, but they should try to do this whenever possible. Neil Warnock was on the Wednesday night League Cup show too and it really adds something having somebody involved rather than a pundit or former pro in there.

The presentation was slicker that ITV’s with Manish Bhasin in the chair, the picture quality was far better, all the goals were shown and much longer was given over to the actual action than we ever got from The Championship. ITV started with a time slot of 45 minutes and worked on cramming everything into that, the BBC have sat down and asked how long a programme like this really needs to be and allotted the time accordingly.

There were problems, I am sick of television and radio asking me what I think for a start. The reading out of e-mails and texts at regular intervals brought something but to be honest the programme could probably do without it. Why every single BBC television and radio programme has to be interactive with one meaningless load of drivel (don’t say it, I know I’ve set myself up for that one) from viewers read out after another is beyond me.

Programmes that do this win awards as well. Five Live Breakfast, for example, was praised at the radio awards for making the listener an integral part of the programme – that’s the reason I stopped listening to it! I don’t want the listener to be an integral part of it, the listener is that stupid bastard in the car next to me, I could not give a rat’s arse what he thinks about anything and yet one text after another is read out remorselessly until your head dissolves into a sticky, pulpy mess on top of your shoulders. “Margaret from Richmond says ‘no, I don’t agree that all paedophiles should be shot,’ Richard from St Margaret’s says ‘yes I do agree that they should be killed’. Do keep those texts coming in.” Yes for fuck’s sake make sure you do, my life would not be complete without knowing what the plebs of this country think about today’s top story.

I also did not like the way one or two of the scores were revealed early – the West Brom v Newcastle highlights for instance were introduced with “fought out a 1-1 draw at the Hawthorns.” Now I knew they had, but to assume everybody saw the match earlier and knows the score is wrong and should not happen again – it didn’t in the League Cup programme on Wednesday so that looks to have been a warning heeded straight away.

Mark Clemmit still annoys the hell out of me unfortunately. He is just too happy and enthusiastic. He has that Rob McAffrey style about him where every interviewee is treated like his lifelong best friend. When he got together with a similarly minded Scunthorpe manager Nigel Adkins it was the biggest out pouring of needlessly happy ‘isn’t this wonderful’ friendliness my living room has been subjected to since that black puppet on Play Days got a Chinese friend. I thought the paint was melting off the walls at one stage, then I realised it was just the tears of joy flowing down my face as for a moment everything seemed right in the world. Then Scunthorpe lost 4-0, serves him right.

Ultimately though The Football League Show was excellent. A professionally put together and presented programme of the right length and with almost none of the irritants that made ITV’s attempt at this over the last four years such an unmitigated disaster. And Kate Bosworth on the bog.