(Appreciation of
Jimmy Hill, accompanying Guardian obituary of the broadcasting and football
legend)
The Guardian,
December 19, 2015
While Jimmy Hill’s football career recedes into a monochrome
era of Woodbines and reinforced toecaps – he was a wing half, which tells you
everything you need to know – his later role as a TV football pundit will be
more readily recalled.
Hill was the first former professional to do the job,
a trailblazer as he was in so many areas of the national
game
, and
more forthright in his views than many of those who followed.
Not that this made him a national treasure. Jimmy wore
hostility like a badge of honour. The current presenter of Match of the Day,
Gary Lineker, told me about a match at Goodison, where Des Lynam and Alan
Hansen were gently barracked, as is traditional, on their way to the TV gantry,
but when Jimmy appeared the good-natured banter turned venomous. “Jimmy Hill,
you’re a wanker, you’re a wanker” was the refrain. Jimmy turned to his colleagues,
beaming. “There you are, that’s fame for you,” he said.
“To Jimmy, it was justification for what he did on TV,”
Lineker told me. “He knew football, having had experience of every role in the
game; fan, player, coach, chairman, director – he was a qualified referee for
goodness sake – but he also knew television, and his view was there was no
point in being mealy-mouthed. It wasn’t an act. He was passionate about the
game and had strong opinions he believed in expressing. Sometimes, of course,
they came from left of field.”
But not from the political left. If your experience of Jimmy
on TV dates no further back than his latter days at the
BBC
– who terminated his contract amid
some acrimony at the end of the 1990s – and his Sunday Supplement on Sky from
1999 to 2007, you may view him as a grumpy old man with values distilled in the
19th hole at a suburban golf club, a kind of Peter Alliss-lite.
That is not to say the Supplement was not enjoyable, like pretty
well every project of Hill’s in 40 years of television. Admittedly, some of the
fun came from Jimmy’s pretence that the Sunday morning paper review was
broadcast from his lovely rural home. To foster this illusion, he used to
introduce the commercial breaks saying he had to attend to some domestic duty,
many of which seemed straight from a Carry On script. “Well, I’m off to peel
the turnips now,” he would announce, or: “It’s high time I went and basted my
meat.”
But late-period Hill misrepresents the man grievously. From
a pretty decent footballing career with Brentford and Fulham, aided by a speed
of thought not always present in his team-mates, through his successful
campaign, as chairman of the PFA, to topple the feudal regime under which
footballers were kept, his
innovative management at Coventry City
, and his time as head of sport at
London Weekend Television from 1968 to 1972, Hill was nothing less than a
revolutionary.
The effects of Jimmy’s revolutions in football and
broadcasting are still being felt today. Take the panel of four outspoken
pundits he introduced to ITV for the World Cup in 1970. Quite apart from its
effect on football punditry, it’s a format that thrives more than 40 years
later on programmes such as Strictly Come Dancing and X-Factor.
Also at ITV he brought the much-loved Brian Moore,
authoritative without being strident, to London Weekend, to commentate and to
host On The Ball, a Saturday lunchtime football magazine show way ahead of
anything the BBC was doing at the time. “We devised as many innovative ideas as
possible to attract a young audience,” Jimmy wrote in his autobiography. “One
idea was a penalty competition where kids took spot-kicks against professional
goalkeepers,” a tradition that lives on in programmes such as Sky’s Soccer AM.
Under Hill’s stewardship World Of Sport, of blessed memory,
was spruced up, too, with the introduction of the ITV Seven, combining the
races covered into a handy betting format.
Away from TV, Hill’s innovations as
manager of
Coventry City
in the 1960s – his espousal of all-seat stadiums and proper
readable match programmes, and his rewriting of the Eton Boating Song as the
Sky Blue Song – have passed into legend in that part of the Midlands (A statue
of Hill at the Ricoh Arena was unveiled by the man himself in 2011).
What
is less well advertised are Jimmy’s “pop and crisps” nights at Highfield Road,
when he got his players to stay behind and sign autographs and hand out free
snacks to hundreds of young fans – not a million miles away from the “community
work” football makes such a fuss of these days.
Decades before fans’ forums, footballers’ Twitter feeds, and
radio ’phone-ins, Jimmy was an advocate of interaction with fans, which did not
always go as smoothly as Jimmy wished. In his early days on Match of the Day,
he introduced a feature in which a supporter got to interview the manager of his
club, but was requested not to ask anything too personal or controversial, a
plan that was scuppered by the Spurs fan who kicked off his chat with then
manager Keith Burkinshaw by asking: “Why, did you sell Pat Jennings to Arsenal?
Why?”
Jimmy was what is sometimes described as “a real football
man,” but he was a real TV man as well. He is undoubtedly godfather to Gary
Neville, until this month making waves as a Sky analyst, as well as Lineker at
the BBC.
“My first presenting job
was the Euro 96 highlights,” said Gary, “Jimmy was my pundit and he was hugely
helpful to me. I was shaking like a leaf, of course, but he was very
encouraging. He was totally involved in all aspects of the programme, and gave
me lots of advice, some of which was obvious, some not, telling me to slow
down, when to listen more, that kind of thing.”
The former Arsenal goalkeeper Bob Wilson is among many
broadcasters who pay tribute to Hill in their autobiographies. Wilson praises
Hill’s versatility, recalling that when the 1971 Arsenal Double team needed a
Cup final song – all teams had one back then – Jimmy altered the lyrics of Rule
Britannia to “Good old Arsenal, we’re proud to say that name, While we sing
this song, we’ll win the game,” for which, given his massive contribution to
football and broadcasting, he should be forgiven.