IN THE summer of 1999, smooth talking Des Lynam made the shock decision to leave the BBC, to take the role as lead football anchor for ITV Sport. He would front live FA Cup and UEFA Champions League football, alongside shared coverage of major international tournaments. Just over two years later, he was back in his traditional role of presenting Saturday evening Premier League highlights. However, ‘The Premiership’ turned into one of the biggest flops in ITV’s distinguished history.
There was big surprise when ITV outbid the BBC for Premiership highlights in the summer of 2000. The three-year contract cost the commercial broadcaster £185million. The BBC’s MOTD team was left devastated by the news and trundled through the remainder of their Euro 2000 coverage looking depressed and downcast. In fact, when watching Gary Lineker that summer, it felt like we were about to watch a funeral procession, let alone a major football match! Always critical of late starts, Des Lynam wanted the new programme to be an early Saturday evening show, rather than the traditional 10.30pm slot, feeling it would appeal to all audiences. He aimed for 6pm at first, but this idea was scrapped due to Sky’s curfew time lock it had on Premier League rights. 9pm was too late, due to ITV’s compact Saturday evening entertainment line-up, so the decision was taken to screen ‘The Premiership,’ at 7pm every Saturday evening. It would turn into one of the most horrendous timing misjudgements of all time!
U2’s Grammy-award winning track ‘Beautiful Day’ was selected as the music theme and although it has no comparison on the Match of the Day theme tune, it was still a brilliant choice of music for football. Major drinks giant Coca Cola was signed up to sponsor the programme, using ‘Leggsy,’ (its mascot) in some hilarious break bumper parodies. Alongside lunchtime show On The Ball and the doomed afternoon results show, The Goal Rush – ITV was the new place for Saturday football entertainment.
On Saturday August 18 2001, ‘The Premiership’ debuted with Middlesbrough v Arsenal, Liverpool v West Ham United and Sunderland v Ipswich Town being chosen as the three featured games. ITV would send its four main commentators; Clive Tydlesey, Peter Drury, Jon Champion and Guy Mowbray out to featured matches, whilst reporters such as Ned Boulting, Russ Williams and Gabriel Clarke would cover the less featured matches. Terry Venables and Ally McCoist would be the main pundits alongside Des in the studio, with Robbie Earle and Ron Atkinson also being used on occasion. ITV decided to pioneer two new technology pieces which failed miserably. The ProZone programme saw Venables hopelessly being able to keep up with technology and had to rush through key moments of games, struggling to explain what this new data meant. Also, Andy Townsend, former Chelsea and Aston Villa midfielder would be at a key match from the weekend in a pathetic ‘Tactics Truck!’ If lucky, Andy might be joined by a Premiership player who had nothing else to do on their Saturday evenings to analyse a game in better depth, but this experiment was quickly abandoned. It worked for Channel 4 with Test Cricket and Channel Five for their live UEFA Europa League coverage, but this format simply didn’t work for highlights. Townsend’s Tactics Truck was torn to shreds by avid football fans and journalists, calling it “totally inept and excruciatingly painful.”
Despite getting critical acclaim on the opening weekend from the News of the World, the viewing figures were disappointing. Only five million watched the opening 7pm show, two million lower than The Weakest Link, which was BBC’s head-to-head competition. The Daily Mirror was a strong critic of The Premiership’s lack of match action and ITV’s determination to show those annoying commercial breaks whenever they could. A week later, viewing figures dropped to 3.1million; ITV’s worst Saturday night viewing figures for a decade and although the average slightly picked up, the 7pm experiment was a doomed failure. Under pressure from the likes of Cilla Black, who was concerned about the later time for her show Blind Date and advertisers, ITV’s controller of sport, now FA chief executive Brian Barwick had little alternative but to shove the show back to a traditional 10.30pm slot from November 2001 onwards.
Afterwards, the show never really recovered and in 2003, the BBC won back the highlights rights from the 2004/05 season onwards. The Goal Rush ended in December 2003, after spectacularly dismal ratings and in May 2004, both On the Ball and ‘The Premiership’ made a quiet and tame exit after three failed seasons.
You have to give ITV some credit for attempting such a bold move, but this was a gamble that spectacularly backfired. The Premiership will always be remembered as a ‘Desater!’
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