Early 1990s, The suburb of Cults, Aberdeen
During the early 1990s, when I was around 13 or 14, and incredibly to the me of today, I would arise on Saturday mornings before midday. This, if memory serves, was the time of life when weekends were an actual advent of joy rather than a punctuation mark of relief between the mundanity and misery of weekdays. Thus, I breakfasted early.
The specific reason, however, for emerging from my pit while posties staggered round the streets swearing under their breaths was due to the buffet of sport Channel 4 would lay on with dishes from all over the globe for our delectation. And since my friends and I were absolutely starving we devoured the whole lot.
For like Goldilocks lost in the woods looking for sanctuary, we had travelled through the week trying to find anything and everything that could possibly be associated with competitive sport to watch. Particularly football. Unfathomable now, it would be a little while longer before those in control would realise fully just how many and how much people enjoy watching it. Or they didn’t care and would rather forego profit than pander to the great unwashed. But occasionally, like in so many other walks of life, they would deign to throw us a crumb or two to shut us up.
However, just like the porridge served up by the three bears to the young trespasser, the three sports programmes on our fat-backed televisions were of varying quality – one too cold, one too hot and one just right. And the name of the bowl plunged below room temperature was Transworld Sport.
I would sum it up thusly: If a corporate video company absolutely had to (gun to head) make a programme about sport, rather than their usual slick promos for luxury hotels, it would be like Transworld Sport. It had all the soul of Richard Branson’s cufflinks, taking the essence of competitive sport, all that makes it great – passion, competitiveness, fun – and throwing a bucket of icy water over it.
I watched it solely for the four or so minutes of football highlights from around the world. Anything else of even the slightest interest was merely a bonus. I just wanted a football fix. I presume there were a lot of others in the same boat because the highlights were gradually moved further and further towards the end of the programme. It became the sporting equivalent of eating up all your greens so you could have your pudding.
Tennis, golf, rallying, sumo wrestling, some strange sport played only in a village in Northern Venezuela – all these and more had to be endured patiently before a little football graphic appeared onscreen, edging you closer to the set with a whisper of ‘yes!’. I could stomach most of the fare on offer but the one aperitif I could not abide was yachting. How I hated yachting – and the completely disproportionate amount of screen time it got!
Yachting neither is, was, or ever will be a sport. You can take that to the bank of Monaco. Sport is inclusive; sport is something you can see then try out with your friends; sport is…the opposite of yachting, that’s what it is.
So obviously we started watching later and later, like wandering in fashionably late to a party, safe in the knowledge we wouldn’t be missing anything important. Until…until the Transworld gods got wise to us football fans. I will admit I do love a good conspiracy theory but this is no theory. This is fact. They realised football fans were only tuning in for the last 15 minutes and started moving the highlights around! After tuning in after the last ad break, before we knew it the end credits would roll and there had been NO football! None. Leaving us all looking at the screen in disbelief. Not since Elliott swore at Five Star on Going Live, had I looked at a TV screen on a Saturday morning like that.
Invariably, just to rub in their power over us, when we flicked on at the generally agreed upon ‘football time’ (or so we thought), it would be men in Hackett polo-shirts pulling on a rope.
Pure vindictiveness.
Apparently, Transworld Sport is still showing on satellite TV so it might be better now. But I don’t have satellite TV, so I wouldn’t know.
The next dish served up was a tad on the hot side, befitting of its Indian origins. It was called Kabaddi.
Suddenly landing on Channel 4 in the U.K with its haunting yet upbeat theme tune, without any warning whatsoever and much to the bewilderment of our little group, the sport involved two teams of players basically playing tig-and-tag. One player from team A, would go into Team B’s half of the court, try and touch one of them, then get back to their own half without being caught and pinned to the deck. Then vice versa and on it went. Oh, and all the while, the marauder had to chant ‘kabaddi’ to prove he was holding his breath.
You know you’ve got a proper sport when breathing is against the rules!
So a group of kids in Aberdeen, and I presume across Britain, are watching this wondering what the hell is going on. But, being impressionable at that age, the outcome was inevitable – we got right into it! We came to know the teams (Punjab, Police, Postal and others not beginning with the letter ‘P’) and picked our favourites players: Balwinder Singh, who was an absolute tank; Anjar Ali, who was the moustachioed Ronaldo of 90s Kabaddi and like a ballet dancer as he grazed the shoulder of an opponent with his big toe before skipping nimbly back to his teammates; and, a guy in the opening credits who did a really cocky celebration when he got back to his own half (which we all adopted as our goal celebration).
Did we play Kabaddi? Of course we did! Which must have looked odd to people who were used to the local youngsters either kicking a ball about or drinking merrydown cider and smoking silkcut. Either, or.
Helpfully, it also gave us something different to say in German class at school when talking about our hobbies instead of groaning out ‘mein lieblings sport ist fussball’ for the thousandth time.
‘Am Samstag, spiele Ich kabaddi werde’ had a much more exotic feel to it when talking about our plans for the weekend. And, of course, it then provided us with the opportunity to explain and demonstrate what it was (i.e. waste time) to the bemused German teaching assistant who flatly refused to believe it was real.
So I brought in a video for him to watch at his leisure.
The next day, this mid-twenties Deutschlander bounded into the classroom, with a gleeful grin, chanting ‘kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi!’ while swatting at us all with his hand, promptly getting himself into trouble from the teacher.
Oh, Andreas…how on earth do I remember your name?
Finally, the dish that was juuuuust right: Gazzetta football Italia – the Italian football highlights show. Featuring James Richardson in the piazza reading the papers, some of the best players in the world on show, Gazza occasionally popping up and doing something odd, the goal celebrations, the passionate ultras putting on grand displays (check out my previous blog post ‘The Good, the Bad and Pittodrie’ to see the trouble their influence got us into!).
It was absolute bliss. The live games on a Sunday however…
I specifically remember the first one ending in a pulsating 3-3 draw between Sampdoria and Lazio and the commentator panicking and pleading with us viewers ‘Please don’t think Serie A is like this every week! Please!’ And how right he was…especially at the end of a season when Milan needed a point to win the league and Brescia needed a draw to stay up.
Nil-nil.
Starved as we were for football on the box, the highlights did us just fine. Although a Milan or Rome derby would continually be looked forward to with naïve hope which would be shattered around 30 minutes in when we all cried out in exasperation ‘Oh no, they’re doing it again! Why does no-one shoot?!’
To hell with that. Anyone fancy a game of kabaddi?
One final anecdote will give you an idea how hungry we were for football to watch. There was a Champions League semi-final between PSG and AC Milan around that time. Big, big game. It was being shown across all the ITV regions – except Grampian, that is. Which, unfortunately, was where we lived. Three Men and a Little Lady was deigned more to our taste even though it was old hat then.
So outraged were we to be deprived of such a huge event (and it was huge then, although now I couldn’t give a stuff about the Champions League), we hatched a plan which was ingenious in its simplicity (ridiculousness).
Three of us took turns calling Grampian TV HQ, putting on various accents pretending to be members of Aberdeen’s French and Italian community complaining bitterly at such insulting scheduling. A barrage of calls, one after the other. We knew we were getting somewhere when the poor woman on the switchboard said after a few turns each ‘yes, we’re getting quite a few calls about this.’
‘I eem note soorpreesed,’ I said in the style of the bloke from Allo Allo.
It could only have been us. We were getting directly through to the same woman every time.
And you know what? They only went and put on the match! They succumbed to all those angry Frenchman and Italians with their terrible, stereotypical accents and changed their scheduling for three young lads sat round a phone in a house in Cults calling them just for the sport of it. We had no hope of anything rather than showing them our disgust and getting up to a bit of mischief.
Just for the sport of it…because, yes, crank calls were like a sport for us back then. Compared to yachting anyway.
They Chopped Down A Hill 