ANCHORS

David Coleman (1958-1968)
Frank Bough (1968-1983)
Desmond Lynham (1983-1993)
Steve Ryder (1993--)

PROGRAMMING HISTORY

BBC
1958-                Saturday Afternoons, Non-Prime-time

The BBC's flagship sports program, Grandstand has been broadcast in Britain since the autumn of 1958. This enduring and resourceful program, runs for approximately five hours every Saturday afternoon pulling together discrete sporting events under one program heading.

Grandstand was conceived by Bryan Cargill, then a sports producer within the BBC, with the idea of unifying the Corporation's live Outside Broadcasts within a single sports omnibus. The sports magazine format had its precedents in both BBC radio and television, and Grandstand joined its sister programs Sportsview (a midweek sports magazine which was presented by Peter Dimmock from 1954 and latterly became known as Sportsnight) and Sports Special (a Saturday evening program of filmed highlights, presented by Kenneth Wolstenholme which aired from 1955 to 1964 when it was replaced by Match of the Day a program exclusively dedicated to soccer) to provide a comprehensive sports portfolio without comparison among the ITV companies.

It was Dimmock, then the Head of BBC Television Outside Broadcasts, who presented the initial two programs. He was soon replaced by the sports journalist David Coleman, who from 1958 to 1968 brought a vibrant style and meticulous sporting knowledge to the program in a decade which saw televised sport in Britain come of age. The role of the anchor has been central to the success of Grandstand whose structure changes from week to week and, on occasion, hour to hour, or even minute by minute. As the public end of a finely tuned production team, the anchor knits together and makes coherent the live and recorded material which alternates between various sports and locations. Since Coleman left the program in 1968, it is a role only a few broadcasters have been privileged to undertake: Frank Bough (1968-83); Desmond Lynam (1983-93) and Steve Ryder (1993-96).

One of the guiding principles of Grandstand has been to appeal to a family audience, despite being male dominated in terms of its selection of presenters, commentators and sports covered. Indeed, it is between the dichotomy of the sports fan (viewed as predominantly male) and the casual viewer (the family audience) that the presenters and commentators seek to appeal and has given the aforementioned anchors of the program recognition as talented broadcasters beyond the genre of televised sport. Similarly, the sports commentators, many of whom joined the BBC in the 1950s and 1960s, have become household names in Britain: Peter O'Sullivan (Horse Racing), Murray Walker (Motor Racing), Bill McLaren (Rugby Union), Peter Allis (Golf), Richie Benaud (Cricket), John Motson (Soccer), David Coleman (Athletics), Ted Lowe (Snooker), Dan Maskell (Tennis) and Harry Carpenter (Boxing). These commentators are among the most enduring names in British broadcasting, and although the latter three practitioners of the lip microphone retired from broadcasting in the early 1990s, all remain familiar to the armchair sports fan.

The individuals who have taken on the challenge of presenting the program have been aware of the need to produce the illusion of a seamless flow of sports entertainment; continuity and slickness being key production values. Without any definitive script or knowing what is going to happen next, the fronting of Grandstand is recognised as one of the toughest jobs in British television. Yet the complexity of directing several Outside Broadcasts in one afternoon, mixing events and making sure everything significant is captured, has been made to look easy.

Although soccer does not feature as one of the alternating live outside broadcasts, due to a historical fear on the part of the soccer authorities that live coverage would affect actual attendance on Saturday afternoons, the sport does figure strongly within the overall news values of the program. Starting with "Football Focus", a review and analysis of the previous week's games and an outlook towards the afternoons matches, Grandstand provides a continual update of the latest scores for its viewers. "Final Score", which concludes the program, provides a soccer results service which emphasises the up-to-the-minute production values, formatively utilizing the technology of what affectionately became known as the "teleprinter" (later replaced by the "videprinter"). "Final Score" was introduced to the program not only as a means of informing soccer fans of their teams' success or failure on a particular Saturday afternoon, but also to provide news of success or failure to the hundreds of thousands of British people who gamble on the football pools. In this respect, Grandstand was the first television programme to take the sports gambler seriously, specifically with regard to horse racing which is a staple diet of the program, combining the coverage of racing events with analysis of race form, betting odds and results.

Between 1965-85 Grandstand had to compete with ITV's sports magazine programme World of Sport. Initially launched in a joint operation between ATV and ABC, and subsequently produced by LWT, World of Sport took up the same scheduling time as Grandstand. Instead of alternating between Outside Broadcasts it televised sports within a far more structured approach. Its demise was due to the problem of overcoming the regional system of the ITV Network and its failure to encroach on the BBC's stranglehold on the television rights to the main sporting events. Of central importance, here, has been the BBC's predominance in the coverage of the 'Listed Events'; a set of sporting occasions which have been sidelined since 1954 by the Postmaster General to maintain non-exclusivity in the broadcasting of Wimbledon tennis, the F.A. Cup Final, the Scottish Cup Final, the Grand National, the Derby, Test Cricket in England, the Boat Race, soccer's World Cup Final, the Olympic Games and the Commonwealth Games. Grandstand has been the vehicle for the coverage of all these events. Therefore, not only has the program established Saturday as a day of televised sport, but also has created a seasonally shifting, broadcasting calendar of sport, ubiquitously known and familiar throughout the nation.

With the introduction of satellite and cable delivery systems in Britain, and the emergence of sports narrowcasting (most notably Sky Sports), the BBC has found it increasingly difficult to compete for television rights to sport as prices inflate. However, the BBC has maintained its commitment to sport, and introduced Sunday Grandstand (formerly Summer Grandstand when it began in 1981) as a means of extending its scheduled hours of sport, under a title which has become synonymous with quality sports programming.

-Richard Haynes