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The closest most of us associate the name Sir David Attenborough with the history of sport on television is his memorable commentary during an episode of Planet Earth II, broadcast in 2016.
That was his breathless voiceover of the annual contest between freshly hatched iguana babies and racer snakes on the Galapagos Islands, a face-off which held the nation transfixed when that extraordinary footage of a life-or-death dash for the shoreline was first aired. But, unlikely as it may seem, the fact is Attenborough is also responsible for some of the few moments of the BBC’s once prodigious sporting output that remain standing. Because, in the days before he became renowned for bringing us ever closer to the drama of the natural world, Attenborough was a hugely influential television controller.
Never mind the landmark series he commissioned like Civilisation, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the Old Grey Whistle Test, he is also the man who kept Match of the Day on our screens. Plus, he was so persuasive in his role as a telly executive he even managed to get the notoriously conservative Wimbledon authorities to change the colour of the tournament balls to yellow (eventually). Not to forget that, when millions of us hunker down to watch the final moments of the World Snooker Championship this weekend, we have one person to thank for it being on the box: David Attenborough.
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Television staple Match of the Day remains on our screens to this day thanks to Sir David Attenborough - Pete Dadds/BBC
Back in the 1960s, while still in his early thirties, Attenborough had tired of his early career as a television executive and was studying for a postgraduate degree at the London School of Economics. But the BBC had long noted his innovative approach to programming and, with its new second television station struggling to make its presence known, persuaded him to become the second controller of BBC2, taking over in March 1965. His idea was to create a channel which, he once explained, “catered to all levels of brow”. There was to be no traditional Reithian snobbery under his watch: all licence-fee payers would be invited to his channel. Not least fans of sport.
On taking control, one of his first tasks was to rescue a programme commissioned by his predecessor Michael Peacock. Match of the Day had begun the previous August, its purpose to offer televised snippets of Saturday’s football. And it had not gone down well in the corridors of the Football League. Those in charge of the game had always been wary of television, fearing that showing matches beyond the annual FA Cup final and the occasional England game would have a detrimental effect on live attendances. Thus it was decided among the game’s hierarchy that the experimental first season of recorded highlights would be the last. But the new BBC2 boss was more than keen to keep the programme going. And in a meeting with the trepidatious blazers, Attenborough managed to assuage their doubts. He did it, he told a documentary to mark Match of the Day’s 50th anniversary, “on the basis that nobody watched BBC2, which was more or less true. BBC2 was only visible in a small part of the country – London and Birmingham – and it had a tiny number of viewers”.
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Before turning his attention to the natural world, Attenborough was controller of BBC2 and championed televised sport - Charlie Ley/Getty Images
“Don’t worry, no one’s watching” is hardly the most compelling sell. But it worked. The Football League signed off on a new season-deal. Soon after which, thanks to Attenborough’s shrewd negotiating skills, the show entered sporting folklore.
Four years later, in 1969, Attenborough finally convinced the government to allow the BBC to introduce a new technology that had long since taken root in the USA and Japan: colour television. It required, however, expensive kit. And Attenborough needed something that would prove its vast superiority over bog-standard black and white to persuade viewers to fork out. So he called a meeting of senior producers, instructing all of them to come up with ideas. The best was a suggestion to embrace the game in which colour is absolutely central to its processes: snooker.
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Attenborough, befitting his ‘national treasure’ status, receives a rousing reception on centre court at Wimbledon last year - AFP/Glyn Kirk
Attenborough seized on the thought, sought the opinion of the established radio commentator Ted Lowe and immediately commissioned Lowe’s idea for a show called Pot Black, a weekly competition involving eight players competing in one-frame challenges. Although available in colour for those who had new sets, for the rest of the nation it remained monochrome. Which explains Lowe’s infamous attempt to clarify things in those early days: “For those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.”
It was Attenborough, moreover, who, in 1973, in his new capacity of director of programmes for the whole corporation, encouraged Grandstand to screen highlights of the semi-final and final of the World Snooker Championship. In 1978, after the tournament moved to the Crucible, daily coverage was introduced, an innovation that has remained in place ever since.
Snooker was not the only sport he brought to the television audience in colour, either. He loved tennis, in particular Wimbledon.
“I mean, it is a wonderful plot: you’ve got drama, you’ve got everything,” he once told the Radio Times. “And it’s a national event, it’s got everything going for it.”
So his new colour BBC2, he decided, would feature not just recorded highlights in the evening as was traditional, but live matches during the day. Thus it was Attenborough who was responsible for half the British workforce feigning illness in order to spend the afternoon behind closed curtains watching the tennis.
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In 1978, daily TV coverage of the World Snooker Championship was introduced, an Attenborough innovation that has remained in place ever since - PA/Danny Lawson
Even then, he was always seeking improvements. He noticed, while watching his station’s output, that it was hard for the home audience to follow white balls moving across green turf. Why not introduce yellow coating for the balls? The International Tennis Federation did a bit of investigation and discovered Attenborough was right: it was not just the green of the All England Club lawns, yellow was a much more visible colour against all the surfaces on which the game was played. In 1972, it decreed yellow was the way forward. Though being Wimbledon, the annual fortnight did not adopt the Attenborough yellow until 1986. By which time the great man himself had long moved on into his career as a nature documentary maker. There can be no doubt he was rather good at that, too.
But it is in sport we have a lot to be grateful to him for. Thanks to his hapless successors in charge of sport, the BBC has largely wilted in the face of rights challenges from more commercially muscular operations. The fact is, there is not much more remaining in the corporation’s portfolio that does not have, some six decades on, a mark left on it by Attenborough. Even in sport, it seems, he is a national treasure.
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