THANKS, Sportsnight - and goodnight. The BBC admitted yesterday that its Wednesday evening fixture of 28 years will be faded out. A new midweek sports programme will be launched next autumn on either Tuesdays or Thursdays and with a new title and format.
It is obviously another manifestation of the intense competition which has the ITV network and Sky tightening their grip on their rights to live football coverage of the Champions League and Premiership matches.
The olde tyme sports presenters used to trumpet, "It's all happening here and now." And it sure is for BBC: in less than a fortnight they have lost the manic talisman Murray Walker and handed him and all Formula One's kit caboodle and spanners to ITV; and they have dug deep into their iron rations to keep laidback Lynam from levitating up to Sky. Now Sportsnight will be gone from Wednesdays.
Sportsnight has lived exactly as long as colour television in Britain. I remember like it was last week the night Sportsnight was launched with a great jangling explosion of self-esteemed credits - and there was David Coleman full of beans and brazenly enthusing over his premiere's menu. In those days the show had a three word title - Sportsnight With Coleman.
And now, as must all old troupers who have run out of material, it has come to the final curtain. No encores.
When Sportsnight began, I was working for the ITV midweek company (ah, those we have loved) Associated Redif fusion as a pink-shirted tyro with beads round my neck and a clipboarded mini-skirt at my beck. They called me editor of outside broadcasts. There were not many midweek ones for ITV to edit. "Nevertheless get out and edit some," they said, "take on Coleman with a vengeance.
We had our Wednesday night staple, of course - all-in wrestling with good old Kent Walton at the ringside. Apart from that grunt and grapple, our endeavours - and, by golly, how we endeavoured - did not come to much.
Well, we had no viewer response because, it usually seemed, we had no viewers. There was a slight bonus in that, of course, because gigantic cock-ups, and we made many, could sail up into the stratosphere and no-one (least of all our bosses) was any the wiser. Occasionally, in the wake of England's World Cup win in 1966, those bosses contrived to get ITV a midweek England match at Wembley.
Bobby Moore's team played Austria. It was ITV's first ever evening soccer recording. Great spools of foot-wide tape in those days. The schedule was so tight we had frantically chopped up and sellotaped together the first-half while the second was still in progress.
For some reason in those days they played the national anthems at Wembley AFTER the final whistle. Austria played a bonny match and it was 2-2 till the 89th minute when the visitors scored their third and the dramatic winner.
Not on ITV they didn't. In our fingers-and-thumbs gormlessness we dropped Austria's clinching goal on the floor and unknowingly stuck on two interminable national anthems. On ITV anyway, that match remains a 2-2 draw.
Most viewers probably felt they had snoozed off and missed the goal - no unending action replays from every angle then.
In fact, by far the most letters and calls of complaint we had next day did not mention the missed goal, but the content of our commentator's line which had closed the programme immediately after the interminable stand-at-attention national anthems had been played. He was Gerry Loftus, a nice cove, a Lancastrian enthusiast who was football correspondent for the now defunct Reynolds News. Looking straight and earnestly at the camera Gerry demanded immediate changes in the England team with the words - "When he gets into bed tonight the first thing Sir Alf Ramsey must determine to do is to immediately get out his chopper." Sportsnights. We'll miss them.
