I Should Have Been at Work. Des Lynam
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commentator it was a total nuisance. Eventually, I managed to persuade him to remove the plaster for a radio interview and he made a big play of ripping it off, so that the microphone could pick up the sound. He always knew precisely what the media needed from him in any given situation.
Then the unthinkable happened. Ali fought his most lethargic contest to date and was on the losing end of a points decision over fifteen rounds. The new heavyweight champion of the world was Leon Spinks, who had only a few professional fights to his credit. Extraordinarily, his brother Michael, who also won an Olympic gold medal in Montreal, at middleweight, went on to win a version of the heavyweight title some years later too.
I always loved going to America for big fight occasions. I felt perfectly at home in the States. All those American movies of my boyhood had set the stage perfectly for me. The first time I went to New York, it seemed so familiar, as though I had been there all my life.
On that first trip there, I came out of my hotel and hailed one of the famous yellow cabs. ‘I wonder if it would be possible to take me to the BBC offices on Fifth Avenue,’ I said to the driver. ‘What is possibility, you want to go there, get in the cab,’ he replied. It taught me an early lesson to cut out the P. G. Wodehouse stuff.
I had been broadcasting on national radio for less than three years when I got a call from someone in BBC Television inviting me to stand in for Frank Bough for four weeks, presenting the Sunday cricket on BBC 2. I explained that cricket was not a special interest of mine in a broadcasting sense. Although I had loved to play the game as a boy, I did not keep up to date with the details of the game in the way I did with many other sports. I was certainly not an expert.
I was told that the job would be simply to ‘top and tail’ the broadcasts and read the scores from other games. It seemed a simple enough task and I agreed to do it. It turned out to be pretty much of a disaster. It rained at all the matches I attended and I was a shuffling nervous wreck as I tried to get the words out to camera. I felt totally ill at ease.
The late, great John Arlott was involved in some of the broadcasts, and it has to be said that he was not overly welcoming. I didn’t particularly blame him. He was hugely famous; I was a raw broadcasting newcomer in comparison. Not for me this television lark, I thought, and I scuttled back to the safety of my radio microphone and ventured nowhere near a television camera again for several years. I had actually received a nice letter from the producer, Bill Taylor, who thanked me for my efforts and thought I managed extremely well. I think he was just being kind.
As time went by, though, people in the business kept telling me I should have another go at television. I was happy doing Sports Report, and my boxing commentaries: by now I had covered the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ in Zaire, the Olympic Games in Munich and the Commonwealth Games in New Zealand; presented the Today programme; and had my own Radio 2 weekly music show, After Seven. I was a busy and successful radio broadcaster. Nonetheless, other people’s ambitions for me were beginning to sway me towards the possibility of doing television. I had put the cricket disasters to the back of my mind by now and had completed a short series of television quiz shows for BBC Northern Ireland. One day I found myself applying for a job with Southern Television (a forerunner to Meridian) to be their sports reporter. I duly sped off to their studios in Southampton, where I was interviewed and given an audition. A few days later I was notified that the job was mine. I would give three months’ notice to the BBC and off I would go to become a regional TV ‘face’.
I went to see Cliff Morgan, the legendary former Welsh rugby union star, who by this time had enjoyed a long career at the BBC and was the Head of BBC Radio Sport and Outside Broadcasts.
‘Cliff,’ I said, ‘I have decided to take the plunge towards television and I think that working on a regional basis would give me the appropriate lower profile in which to learn something about the craft. Then I will find out if I could ever do the business at a national level, hopefully with the BBC. It’s a gamble, but it’s one I have decided to take.’ I must have sounded a pretentious little twit.
‘Lynam,’ he said, ‘you haven’t got the sense you were born with. Here you are making a name for yourself in radio. You’re having brilliant experience covering all the big events. You’ll end up reporting Bournemouth and bloody Boscombe Athletic. I’ll tell you when it’s time for you to make your television move and it’ll be national television, not piddling about on the Isle of Wight.’ Cliff was not being disparaging about those charming areas of the South Coast; he was merely using his graphic language to dissuade me from my intentions.
He was a very persuasive boss, was Cliff, as well as being one of the major influences in my broadcasting life. He remains a dear friend and I am proud and privileged to have known him. Ironically, he now lives on the Isle of Wight, where, sadly, he has not been enjoying the best of health.
The outcome of our conversation was that I telephoned Southern Television and told them I wasn’t taking the job. They were not best pleased with me. It would be another twenty-three years before I did make my move to ITV.
Some time later, Cliff, who had moved back to television, fixed me up with the chance to present two days’ racing at the Grand National meeting, on the Thursday and Friday before the big day itself. Once again I felt less than comfortable. Nowadays I envy those young presenters on satellite television who get their break reading the sports news off an autocue in front of a minimal audience. At least they have the time to get used to a TV camera up their snout. I was out in the wind and rain of Aintree, notes blowing all over the place, desperately trying to remember where I was, who I was, and what the hell I was doing there. By the Friday night I had convinced myself that live television was not for me, and was tempted to write to Southern Television to tell them what a lucky escape they had had. Once again, though, I received a very kind note, this time from the Head of BBC Television Sport, Alan Hart. He thanked me for making what he thought had been ‘a first-class contribution to the programmes’ and wrote that it was the opinion of everyone in his department, not just his. He also mentioned that if I felt disposed to appear on the box again, I should ring him and arrange lunch. I didn’t, and I didn’t. I would not in my wildest dreams have thought then that I would have ended up presenting the Grand National broadcast, one of the most prestigious and difficult events that BBC Television covers, for fifteen years running.
I didn’t call Alan but amazingly enough later in that year, 1977, he called me. He said he had been discussing me with Cliff and that he and I should meet, which we did at the Chelsea home of the racing commentator Julian Wilson. Over lunch, Alan spelled out that he thought – despite my fears and lack of confidence – that my future lay in television and that, once I really got the hang of it, the future could be rosy. I didn’t believe a word he was saying, but a part of me wanted him to be right. I actually thought a bit of fame might not go amiss.
Eventually Alan made me an offer. It was for a three-year contract with BBC Television at nearly twice my then salary of just short of £7,000. That was the part of the deal that encouraged me to move. I thought, I’ll have one more go. I can always go back to radio. I had to resign my comfortable staff job and now, apparently, I needed someone called an ‘agent’.
An agent. I had never needed one before. I had simply taken the salary offered me by the BBC and any increases they had felt like giving me in the eight or so years I had been a radio broadcaster. I had started on just over £2,000 a year at the end of 1969, and by 1977 I was earning the princely sum of close to £7,000 a year. I had been totally content with this compensation. I had a pleasant place to live, usually a nice sports car, and when I wanted to eat out or buy my friends a drink I could afford to do so. Money hadn’t really entered the equation. I could have still been in the insurance business. I was mostly thanking my lucky stars, David Waine and Angus McKay, for changing my life.
But now the BBC wanted to double my money – unimaginable riches. So I took the plunge and decided to have a real go at