First viewed : Winter 1988
I must admit I'm cheating a bit here as this was on when I was playing pool down at The Red Lion on Friday nights and I hardly saw any of it at the time. Fortunately some of it is on YouTube.
It was a regional programme for Granada viewers. presented by Tony Wilson with New Order inevitably providing the theme tune. It brought in the two greatest football entertainers of the seventies for a chat about the period, based around extended footage from the ITV vaults.
Marsh of course retired tidily after making a packet in the USA and became a top football pundit. Best's playing career just dribbled away and he never found much of a role for himself beyond feeding the tabloids every so often. You would expect then that Marsh would be very assured and Best shambling and incoherent by comparison but he was generally tidy and lucid - this was just a year before the infamous Wogan appearance. You don't really think of Wilson as a football man and he did seem a bit less sure of himself in their company but he obviously knew enough to stay in the conversations.
Though, as far as I'm aware, the show wasn't broadcast outside the Granada region, the format reappeared in the very similar There's Only One Brian Moore a few years later.
Anthony H was actually a HUGE football nut. He worshipped Man Utd all his life and as utterly obsessed. I remember some dismal cheapo celeb show he was involved in in the early 00s that saw him and a handful of other Z listers try alternative therapies abroad. He was there in some exotic, mystical locale in India (I think) and got up everyone's nose because he went AWOL one Saturday afternoon to check the premier league results on his mobile. Indeed at this stage in his life Wilson referred to himself as a Sparts Presenter, a TV guy who dealt in sport and art.
ReplyDeletePresumably recording happened early in the day, or they somehow managed George well enough so that he'd stayed sober long enough. By all accounts, he was a fairly intelligent guy when he was straight.
ReplyDeleteI remember Wilson upsetting some of the United hardcore by coming out in support of Rupert Murdoch buying us - I wonder if those same lads had a rueful chuckle when the Glazers took over a few years later. That said, Wilson was of the "give them a chance" mentality with that lot too!