I've been subscribing to an email that lists interesting TV/ Radio programmes for about 25 years now - one of the regular features they do is profiling a star from TV of yesteryear. Last week it was our Jimmy - have copied + pasted from the email the article, if anyone fancies a read. (Will post accompanying YouTube clips at the end)
Well, with the new era for Match of the Day beginning this weekend, we thought we’d take the opportunity to highlight probably its most famous face. He’s a man who made probably a bigger contribution to football than anyone else, and yet despite, or maybe because of that, he was never universally popular, especially in Scotland. Are you watching...
JIMMY HILL
Easy to forget that before all the telly fame, Jimmy was actually a half-decent footballer who had a pretty good career. Born in Balham in 1928, he was obsessed with football as a boy and started his professional career with Brentford in 1949, before moving to Fulham in 1952 and staying for nearly a decade, helping them reach the First Division for the first time. This was a million miles away from the current explosion of content surrounding football, but Jimmy established himself as one of more media-friendly players, always happy to give interviews and arranging various endorsements, including a memorable advert for Remington where “Fulham’s famous bearded inside right” put his chin to good use.
Actually Jimmy did contribute to the current era of football domination as he was Chairman of the PFA when the maximum wage was abandoned, allowing players to earn bigger wages, though it’s a fair bet he didn’t anticipate what that would lead to. But he was also thinking about the future of football and in the early sixties wrote a manifesto for football which turned out to offer suggestions that were years ahead of their time, including all-seater stadia, pre-match entertainment and live matches on TV. He was able to put some of those ideas into practice when he became manager of Coventry in 1962, where he transformed the club on and off the pitch, taking them from going nowhere into the Third Division to promotion to the First. But he’d never manage them in the top flight, as he fell out with the board and quit – but wasn’t wanting for work.
His media work and his forthright opinions had already caught the eye of the broadcasters, and he’d been a pundit on the Beeb’s coverage of the 1966 World Cup. In 1968 the newly-formed LWT hired him to be Head of Sport, with the aim to revitalise ITV’s rather staid football coverage and take on the Beeb. His first decision was to poach Brian Moore from BBC Radio, and when Moore was told a Mr Hill was on the phone for him, the only one he could think of was Lord Hill, the BBC chairman, and he wondered what he’d done that was so awful the Chairman was phoning him. Together they devised The Big Match, which swiftly became a Sunday afternoon institution – a show that took football seriously, but also realised it should be fun as well, so it accompanied the highlights with stacks of features, interviews and competitions. And Jimmy played an important role on screen as well, taking a few minutes every week to explain the finest technical points of the game. Nobody had ever really done that on TV before and Moore was convinced that he completely changed the way football was discussed in Britain.
For a while, The Big Match was about the only show on LWT that was actually successful, its early days being something of a disaster with various executives making a swift exit, and such was the boardroom turmoil that for a while Jimmy found himself as Deputy Director of Programmes. But this additional work off screen didn’t limit his appearances on screen, and he was consistently looking for ways to innovate and bring a new perspective to football coverage, including one week taking Raquel Welch to Chelsea, for reasons which have been somewhat lost in the mists of time.
In addition to revolutionising football coverage during the season, in 1970 he shook it up in the World Cup as well. Now, Jimmy wasn’t the first person to invent the punditry panel, because he’d been on one on the Beeb in 1966. But what Jimmy did was cast a panel that would spark off each other, with lots of big personalities, and also have them on every single day of the tournament, as well as giving them licence to be suitably outspoken. None of them went to Mexico, and indeed didn’t get any further than the North Circular, but they were all put up in a hotel when they ran up the biggest bar bills in the venue’s history. It was money well spent, though, as Malcolm Allison, Paddy Crerand, Derek Dougan and Bob McNab quickly became huge stars. It’s often quoted that it was the only time ITV beat the BBC at the tournament, which we actually don’t think is true, but it was pretty close – and Granada were off air because of a strike for some of it including the final which would have cost them a few million viewers – and it was certainly influential as the first time pundits expressed opinions more challenging than “hard luck”.
And as well as making waves on and off screen, at LWT Jimmy managed to fill a few more roles in the game. One of the most famous moments in his career came in September 1972 when he went to Highbury to watch Arsenal vs Liverpool ahead of its appearance on The Big Match and found himself pressed into service as a linesman as nobody else was available. A few months later, Brian Moore was ill so he did his one and only stint as commentator, undergoing a bit of a baptism of fire as
Brighton vs Chelsea in the FA Cup turned out to be a right roustabout of a Cup tie with the fists flying throughout, though Jim just about managed to hold it together.
By 1973 Jim had done pretty much everything at LWT apart from clean the toilets, and had established ITV Sport as a first-class alternative to the BBC. But for all his prominence, The Big Match wasn’t nationally networked with the other major regional companies doing their own thing, so while he seen UK-wide during the tournaments, for the other eleven months of the year he was pretty much invisible outside London. Seemingly one too many cab drivers outside the capital asked him what he was doing these days and so he accepted an offer to join the BBC and get the national platform he felt he deserved. No executive role here, but he became very much the face of the Corporation’s football coverage, not just punditing but presenting as well.
And for the rest of the seventies Jimmy’s Match of the Day became a Saturday night institution. He was never the slickest of presenters, making some memorable cock-ups (“Send your entries to Goal of the Month, BBC TV, London W12 8QT, read twice”) but he had bags of authority and also plenty of opinions which he wasn’t scared of expressing. That did mean that over the course of the season he was seemingly guaranteed to say something that annoyed the fans of all 92 league clubs, and even manage to irritate some viewers by the way he announced a goalless draw as “nought-nought” rather than “nil-nil”. And after he seemingly turned his nose up at Scottish football, not least by writing off David Neary’s wonder goal in the 1982 World Cup as a fluke, he was particularly unpopular north of the border. But he clearly had the game’s best interests at heart and once said that he would be happy on Cup Final day if the match was rubbish but there’d been a suitably solemn rendition of Abide with Me.
And Jimmy never minded the criticism at all, happily laughing off the chants addressed to him when fans spotted him at a ground by saying “well, that’s fame for you”. He also did as much as anyone to keep football in the public eye during the dark days of the eighties, always looking to accentuate the positive and try and encourage lapsed fans to give it another chance. It was a bit of a blow for Jimmy and the whole of the Beeb in 1988 though when they lost the rights to league football to ITV, leaving them with just England and the FA Cup, and for a new approach for a new era Jimmy moved from presenter back to his old role of pundit.
