Male presenters consigned to history as big beasts at BBC Sport are all female

[ASFN Admin]

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For the second edition running, the BBC’s Sport’s Personality of the Year will not have a male host - WireImage/Karwai Tang

After a fortnight of billycans and bellyaching in the Australian jungle, Alex Scott has just returned from I’m A Celebrity to her familiar seat on Football Focus.

Her brief absence failed to make any appreciable impact on a show which, like the Last Night of the Proms, appears to have been doing exactly the same thing for decades. But it was interesting to see the identity of her deputy for the past fortnight: Jeanette Kwakye, the former sprinter who presented the World Athletics Championships this summer.

This two-week substitution only added to the sense that there is just one route into camera-facing roles at BBC Sport in 2025, and that is to have been a female athlete like Scott, Kwakye, Isa Guha, Sam Quek or Chemmy Alcott.

This is not to suggest that I have a problem with any of these presenters on an individual level. Having worked her way up via many years at BBC London and Channel Five, Kwakye has more than earned her shot, and she is a warm and likeable presence with more feel than the often rigid Scott.

But as a group, we are looking at levels of homogeneity not seen since the early 1990s: an era when the only question was whether the inevitable male presenter would have a moustache or not.

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For years BBC sport presenters were all white, middle-aged men – seen here, in 1998, are all the hosts of Grandstand, Steve Ryder, David Coleman, Peter Dimmock, Des Lynam and Frank Bough - PA

A course correction was clearly required. But it is hard to shake the feeling that, like a duffer on a golf course, the BBC have hacked their way out of the rough on one side of the fairway, only to overshoot in the opposite direction.

Since Gary Lineker finished a 25-year stint in May, Mark Chapman is the only remaining male presenter with any stature – even if you can still find Jason Mohammad hiding out in the obscurity of Final Score and Rishi Persad popping up in a supporting role at the tennis or golf.

Apart from Chapman, today’s big beasts are all female. When the BBC screens its Sports Personality of the Year show on Thursday, the line-up will consist of Scott alongside A-listers Gabby Logan and Clare Balding – for the second year running Spoty’s presentation team will be a man-free zone. Last year was the first time no men had presented the programme in its 71 years.

“About time”, some might say. The chauvinists have had it their way for long enough. And these monoliths surely needed dismantling. In recent years, the visibility of so many female presenters has helped younger generations move on from the prescriptive “boys like sport, girls like fashion” dichotomy to something much more fluid, organic and personal.

At the same time, though, it does feel as though the battle has been won – in broadcasting terms at least. And that the talent bookers could now relax a little.

Positive discrimination has its own problems. For one thing, it undermines the achievements of the very people it is promoting, leaving them open to charges of tokenism even when they are quality broadcasters in their own right.

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Mark Chapman, seen here with Gabby Logan and Kelly Cates, is the only male big beast BBC Sport has - BBC/Charlie Clift

For another, the whole lesson of diversity training is that groups with a range of backgrounds are more creative, successful and downright interesting than uniform ones. If you simply replace one orthodoxy – in this case, that of middle-aged white males – with its polar opposite, you’re not actually fixing that issue.

Anyway, back to Football Focus. Which, this weekend, started with a pair of former Premier League defenders – Ashley Williams and Stephen Warnock – performing Geordie accents in a feeble impersonation of I’m A Celebrity presenters Ant and Dec. Alistair McGowan, they were not.

Here was a chummy beginning to a programme which also featured cosy interviews with Bernardo Silva and Marcus Rashford. Everyone seemed to be smiling all the time, as if to project the impression that modern football is a cuddly enterprise in which we are all friends together, rather than a ruthless corporate machine.

In the BBC’s defence, perhaps this is the only way to play a lunchtime show that functions as a sort of audio-visual wallpaper, covering the gap in the Saturday schedules between Mary Berry’s Love to Cook and Paddy McGuinness’s visit to a Belgian chocolate factory.

But while you could imagine having Football Focus on in the background while chopping carrots, it’s hard to see anyone actually dialling it up on iPlayer. The analysis is too superficial, and the interviews too bland, in an age when the BBC are competing with so many podcasts and YouTube channels – many of them offering genuine sharpness, insight and wit.

The best part of Football Focus was the debate about Mohamed Salah’s outburst a week earlier – a vanishingly rare example of a player sidestepping the Orwellian control of his media handlers and actually speaking his mind, for which Salah has ironically been excoriated by the vast majority of pundits ever since.

Otherwise, though, this feels like an analogue show in a digital era. Like those all-male presentation line-ups of the 1990s, it is painfully out of date.

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