Saturday evening regional news and sports programmes in the 80s and 90s

[Brekkie]

Yes - the "stories" are usually what has been decided upon in the office during the week but not to at least give the results is lazy and poor service to the minority of viewers who don't venture online for them - surely not that hard to at least have a basic results template to flash up on screen.

[Steve in Pudsey]

I remember on a Sunday, listening to the Sunday League cricket commentary on Radio Leeds and at some point between overs Kevin Howells would do his match report for Look North to record, about half an hour before the bulletin.

Incidentally did these Saturday bulletins exist as an opt out of Grandstand at one point in the distant past?

[Markymark]

Yes - the "stories" are usually what has been decided upon in the office during the week but not to at least give the results is lazy and poor service to the minority of viewers who don't venture online for them - surely not that hard to at least have a basic results template to flash up on screen.

Someone on DS mentioned yesterday that back in the 70s, some local newspapers would publish a Saturday evening edition that would include that afternoon's sports results. That was impressive!

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Incidentally did these Saturday bulletins exist as an opt out of Grandstand at one point in the distant past?

Didn't Wales opt out before the end of Grandstand (and not opt back) with Wales on Saturday?

[Stuart]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aidGjkEzrU 

A Westcountry News and Sport Saturday dual presented edition from 2003

I always liked those 'smoky' Westcountry News/Live titles and rearranged theme music. 

It's such a shame that they ruined the whole tone of the programme by replacing the desk with a brown sofa in the studio that they'd obviously found at Chelson Meadow (the local council dump in Plymouth).  

[Steve Williams]

Someone on DS mentioned yesterday that back in the 70s, some local newspapers would publish a Saturday evening edition that would include that afternoon's sports results. That was impressive!

Yes, the Saturday Pink, many newspapers did these which were particularly haphazard publications. I had a couple of Sunderland pinks from the mid-80s I got from a car boot sale, and aesthetically they were appalling, with match reports spread across the pages in dribs and drabs depending on when each page was printed, with a Stop Press column on the back page with the final scores from some of the matches featured elsewhere in the paper which hadn't finished before that page went to press. One of them I have is from the day of the Bradford fire, with very sketchy reports throughout.

When I lived in Cleethorpes twenty years ago now, the local pink there came to an end and I bought the special commemorative final issue with various front pages over the years. That paper had a mascot on the front page and if Grimsby had a good result it would be smiling, if it was alright it would be fairly passive and if it was a bad result they'd be scowling, which would serve as an immediate way to find out the result without even having to read the story.

The last Saturday pink in Britain seems to have been in Southampton, which folded in 2017 - https://pressgazette.co.uk/the-end-of-an...119-years/

One of the other oddities about Grandstand in the seventies is that some of the match reports would actually come from a studio, either the Grandstand studio or a regional one, rather than the actual match, which meant the reporter would actually have to leave the game before the end to make it to the studio, and sometimes not make it.

Bob Wilson always told the story about the first time he ever did a match report for Grandstand, one of his first ever TV jobs, he reported from Arsenal vs Man U from the Grandstand studio (which I reckon was probably this match in August 1973 - https://www.11v11.com/matches/arsenal-v-...973-82092/). He was a bit nervous about this, but David Coleman said it would be fine as long as he got his first line right, so he should come up with a first line, memorise it, and then deliver it and after that it would all flow naturally. So he came up with "I've just got back from Highbury where Alan Ball was the man of the match", repeated it to himself over and over again in the car back to the studio and then Frank Bough introduced him by saying "Let's hear from Bob Wilson who's just got back from Highbury where Alan Ball was the man of the match. That right, Bob?"

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Didn't Wales opt out before the end of Grandstand (and not opt back) with Wales on Saturday?

Yes, in the late eighties I think they started doing Wales on Saturday: The Results instead of Final Score, and then the regional news was extended to haf an hour and was billed as Wales on Saturday: The Magazine, which meant BBC Wales would always opt out of the first programme on BBC1 on Saturday evening. That was alright when it was usually a cartoon or Dad's Army, but when The Simpsons started at 5.30 on Saturdays in 1996, that was too important for Wales to opt out of, so Wales on Saturday moved to BBC2. That caused a bit of a stink in our local paper in Wrexham, because the Wrexham transmitter only broadcast BBC1 Wales and S4C, so it was very hard to pick up BBC2 Wales.

Wales on Saturday carried on until quite recently, the bit that opted out of Final Score, I think it only ended about a decade ago. BBC Scotland still opt out of Final Score. Northern Ireland used to opt out of the last bit of Final Score, they used to go straight after the classified results at 5pm, but I don't think they do now. I don't think any of the English regions ever opted out of it.

[RR]

Re the Football Pink - the colour varied by newspaper - several were Green.

The most surprizing one I saw was when I had been as an away supporter to Manchester City. In those days they kept the away supporters in the ground before they cleared the home supporters. By the time we could leave, they were already selling the paper. I believe the same happened in a few other grounds if one hung around until 5:15 ish.

It is something (as are evening newspapers in general) that have lost their reason to exist as radio, TV (e.g. Soccer Saturday and its copies) and now the internet have more than enough content for football fans, and of course the bigger teams tend not to play many games at 3pm on Saturday.

[Spencer]

The Leeds edition of Look North on Saturdays continued to be branded "Look North News and Sport" for quite a while, presumably a legacy of the old "Look North Saturday" programme?



Image from TV Live

Ah, I'd forgotten about the cheapo 'squashed pea' titles.

[Humphrey Hacker]

Where I lived it was the “Green-Un”. It had a mixture of sports results and a TV guide.

[radiolistener]

Where I lived it was the “Green-Un”. It had a mixture of sports results and a TV guide.

The Lincolnshire Echo had a 'Green Sports Echo' well into the 2000s.

Also don't forget daily local newspapers would have 2 editions as well - an early morning "evening" edition, as well as a proper "evening" one later in the day.

[Steve Williams]

Where I lived it was the “Green-Un”. It had a mixture of sports results and a TV guide.

Yes, they were all different colours, although the pink seems to be the catch-all term. One other benefit of having a TV guide in them was because until deregulation newspapers were only able to print the TV listings for a single day, with the exception of Saturday's when they could print the next day's as well.

As the ITV Regional Highlights website illustrates, the pinks also have value as one of the few ways to find out what matches were shown on TV that weekend, with the broadcasters unable to announce their choices until after they'd kicked off. That was another valuable aspect of the Saturday teatime sports bulletin as well, you'll note Today's Sport ends with the announcement of what matches will be on Match of the Day.

[Colm]

Over in Northern Ireland, there was Ireland's Saturday Night, produced by the Belfast Telegraph, beginning as a pink paper pre-partition (hence the title, although it was, according to Wikipedia, known colloquially as 'The Ulster') and remained in print 'til 2008.

On TV, BBC NI did the whole 'different-name weekend bulletin' thing as well; from c. 1987 to 1992, you had 'Inside Ulster Newsline', which I'm sure i7nvolved separate news and sport presenters.

Indeed, up until the early 1990s, and while almost everyone else was watching 'Neighbours' on BBC1, a short sports bulletin, branded 'Today's Sport' and later 'Sportswide', preceded 'Inside Ulster'.

Looking at Genome/the BBC website in general, 'Final Score from Northern Ireland' stopped in March 2020...

...and I can't mention FS from NI without sharing this wonderful and scarily-accurate parody from 'down South':



UTV did separate sports bulletins on Saturday from the early days, but there was a few years' gap in the late 80s/early 90s until they made a big push with 'Saturday Sport' in the mid 90s - so much so, there were two of those bulletins: one at 1.10pm shunting any networked output which immediately followed by ten minutes; then another at c. 5.05pm which would often run to 20 minutes long depending on the available timeslot.

Then, by 1999, that bizarre situation of:

- a merged UTV Live evening news/sport bulletin from the continuity studio (complete with often-cheesy handover from the continuity announcer was reading the news to the sports presenter) on Saturdays

- separate evening bulletins from the UTV Live studio on Sunday: the news presented as UTV Live, followed by 'Sport on Sunday' - the latter was almost always a sponsored programme; hence the need for separation

...all of which stopped when UTV essentially shut down its sports department at the end of 2008.

[Robertclark125]

Back in the 1980s, did a report on Final Score, or the ITV results service, of a game, also appear with the same reporter on a regional sports programme?

[Steve in Pudsey]

I think BBC regional telly tended to use local radio reporters/commentators rather than the Final Score reporters who were also working into network radio

[Brekkie]

I'd imagine unions probably limited how people could be used too.