Jim Rosenthal: If you follow sport on BBC, I feel sorry for you

Telegraph

17 hours ago

From Wimbledon and Formula One to the Olympic Games, multiple World Cups (football and rugby) and some of the most dramatic nights in boxing history, has there been a more versatile broadcaster than Jim Rosenthal?
Any sense that Rosenthal, the face of ITV Sport for almost three decades, might take himself remotely seriously, however, is soon assuaged. 'There was that phrase 'safe pair of hands' – I could have been a reliable defensive midfielder,' he says, before scrolling through his phone and playing a clip that his son, an actor and comedian, has just sent.
Tom Rosenthal was recently on BBC Radio 2 when, during an intersection to the travel news, it suddenly dawned upon the veteran presenter Sally Boazman who Tom's father is. 'You look so like your dad – really, really interesting face,' she exclaimed, before noting that she is 'glad that he's still alive' and asking for her best wishes to be relayed.
Tom almost falls off his chair laughing at the attempted compliments and, upon rewatching, Jim is not far behind.
@bbcradio2
Sally + The Full Rosenthal = Absolute stitches 😂
♬ original sound - BBC Radio 2
Rosenthal is alive all right and, while now 77 and no longer a fixture on our screens, speaks with the same passion and encyclopaedic knowledge you will remember. An unforgettable voice remains reassuringly familiar.
Rosenthal is evidently also keeping himself very fit and, on the morning of our afternoon coffee, had just run six miles through Hyde Park. 'I think people thought they might need to give me the kiss of life,' he says. Had they asked, they could also have heard a personal anecdote about pretty much any sporting personality of note during the past 50 years.
Ferguson's hairdryer treatment
I mention Sir Alex Ferguson and he tells me about their first meeting, in Aberdeen, when he was dispatched to Scotland's East Coast to document how they were breaking up the Old Firm dominance. 'He was always first in and last away,' says Rosenthal who, between recounting one personal Fergie hairdryer anecdote, says they actually met up just a few months ago.
'Two old boys,' he says. 'He took me down to his garden centre and we had a bite to eat; talking about anything and everything. I do treasure that relationship. Everyone goes on about the fear side. There's the generous side of his nature as well. When I had a bad time at ITV, he sent me a message I'll never forget.'
And his taste of the hairdryer?
'Light entertainment had asked me to do a pre-FA Cup final show on the Friday: Arsenal v Newcastle United,' he says. 'They had a lot of anti-Manchester United jokes. I was, 'No – I don't want to say that'. They also had a blank white T-shirt and nagged me to hold it up and go: 'There we go, here's what Man United won this year.'
'On the Monday it was the launch of ITV's France '98 panel and Fergie was working with us. I looked over at him and he looked away. I thought, 'That's not good'. We then had a team picture. I sat in the front, Alex behind. And he had a three-minute rant, 'What the f--- are you doing? You're a sports presenter. Why are you getting involved in nonsense like that?' It went on and on and on. I could feel the breath. It was the hairdryer and then some at full blast.
'In the end, it was Terry Venables who said, 'Leave him alone Alex, he's got the message'. I felt terrible. At lunch, I said to Alex, 'We need to have a conversation'. He was: 'Why's that? It's forgotten. It's done.' and it was. We worked together for the next six weeks. If you think about it, that's how he must have been with his players. And he was probably right by the way – I shouldn't have done that.'
I mention Muhammad Ali and Rosenthal then tells me about working on boxing for BBC Radio in the late Seventies and making a cold call to what he had been told was his telephone number in Los Angeles. Ali himself picked up the phone and, by the end of the day, Rosenthal had spent four golden hours inside the home of sport's original GOAT.
Rosenthal has never formally retired – and actually only finished a five-season stint presenting live Premier League football on Amazon in December – but also seems perfectly content to have come full circle in now consuming most of his sport as a fanatical observer. He had promised himself he would not bother with the Club World Cup, but admits that he has succumbed.
'Without satellite television I dread to think what my life would be like,' he says. 'The coverage in general terms is fantastic. The pictures you get are absolutely amazing.
'I was fortunate in terms of where sport was – there weren't that many of us doing it. The cake is now sliced up into so many different bits. There's some bloody good broadcasters but it's hard to make that sort of impact.'
BBC 'not a brand leader in sport'
With the ongoing Wimbledon Championships being one of the few major live events that have stayed on the BBC, he thinks that the mass loss of live sport on terrestrial television could have been significantly mitigated.
'Obviously things do move on ... [but] there was an arrogance from both BBC and ITV not to do deals with the satellite companies,' he says. 'That was a mistake. Someone said, 'We'll shoot the satellite out of the sky'. Why should they [the satellite companies] do deals now when they have got their own big audiences?
'I should be really grateful to the BBC. They've trained me but the way they have been with sport… they're the only organisation in the world that has £5 billion on the tap that never gets turned off every year. Choosing where you put your money is absolutely up to the BBC but don't say, 'We haven't got the money'.
'Sports Personality of the Year, we'd gnash our teeth and go, 'Crikey they've got all that'. But now it's completely flipped. Quite simply if you follow your sport on BBC, and haven't got satellite television, I feel sorry for you. The reach of the BBC is phenomenal still – it's a phenomenal brand – but they are not a brand leader in sport.'
Wimbledon fever prompts Rosenthal to recall his debut working on the tournament in 1978 with, among others, the legendary Fred Perry. 'Three minutes to 2pm on the first day, he was, 'There's a call you must take'. Then there was a voice. 'Is that Rosenthal?'
'Yes, it is.'
''It's the BBC pronunciation department. I just want to make sure you are calling the defending champion correctly. The correct pronunciation is 'Bjorn Borr-ee'. I was, 'Mate, there will be a lot of people wondering what the hell I know about tennis if they are my first words. I'll be dead in the first 10 seconds'.'
Commentary about 'emotion not statistics'
Rosenthal believes that a big fault now of commentators, pundits and presenters is to rely excessively on statistics. He also urges them to pay no attention to social media. 'Some commentators are absolutely incredible, and they are treated like axe murderers with the vitriol that comes their way,' he says.
'When I did the Amazon games, somebody said, 'We'll send you a stats pack – it's 75 pages'. There's never been an iconic commentary line with a stat in it and there never will be. It's finding the emotions. One of the first things I was told coming from radio to TV was: 'Don't talk all the bloody time.' Other than that I've never had any training. B------ings, but not training.'
Talk of the great commentators and presenters soon gets Rosenthal purring. Among others, he loved Brian Moore, Peter Jones, Dickie Davies, Bryon Butler, Michael Parkinson and Murray Walker. 'There's never been a commentator more suited to a sport than Murray,' he says. 'He'd get so much information in that paddock – talk to the tyre people, the caterers, everybody. I said to Martin Brundle, 15-20 years ago, 'You've got it in you to become the new Murray Walker' and he's close. That broadcasting combination was made in heaven. You get these combinations that you could never manufacture but just work: Reg [Gutteridge] and Jim [Watt] in boxing, Saint and Greavsie.'
Rosenthal later directs me to Jones's extraordinarily moving dispatch from Hillsborough on the day that 97 Liverpool fans so tragically lost their lives and shakes his head in a mixture of sadness and professional awe.
With a background in news reporting after training on the Oxford Mail and then covering the Birmingham bombings in 1974, Rosenthal would himself experience haunting occasions when the actual sport became irrelevant.
ITV's Big Fight was a Saturday night institution during the early Nineties, peaking in both drama and tragedy with an extraordinary series of bouts involving Chris Eubank, Michael Watson and Nigel Benn that could draw in excess of 16 million viewers. 'It was a huge sport on ITV – we stopped dinner parties,' he says. Rosenthal's voice then trails off as he also acknowledges the guilt you can feel about being drawn to the spectacle and recalls the life-changing injuries that were respectively inflicted on Watson and then Gerald McClellan.
'I think after those two fights – and I don't blame them either – the executives said, 'We don't really want people watching this live on Saturday night prime time',' he says.
Another free-to-air juggernaut in this era was athletics.
'Linford Christie, Sally Gunnell, Colin Jackson, John Regis, Steve Cram – I cannot tell you how big it was,' says Rosenthal. 'Now, go in the street, and say, 'Name a British athlete'. What would they say? It's the saddest sports story of the lot. The only caveat is I now see many more people running around than I ever did.
'You'd have two hours on a Friday night – ITV would get 8-9 million [viewers] and then we'd hand over to Channel 4 who had 4-5 million. I got hauled in once. They said, 'You're taking too many viewers to Channel 4. I was, 'What do you want me to say? That I wouldn't bother, it's a load of c--p coming up?'
'We're a sports-loving nation – massive optimists about sport. I'm a believer in sports needing big characters, big rivalries. Once that's lost, it's very hard. Every sport is a market place – and your stall has got to look pretty good.'
ITV, he reveals, would have away days at a Surrey hotel where they would try to forecast the nation's next big sporting obsession. 'We used to have massive debates: what is going to be the new snooker? One time we came up with croquet. Madness. We also did a whole afternoon of polo on World of Sport. Wrestling would be the springboard to the whole of ITV for Saturday night.'
As well as being a huge viewer of sport, Rosenthal is himself now president of the Cookham Dean Cricket Club and a director at Northampton Town in League One. 'I get a lot of enjoyment out of that involvement,' he says. 'I've always been a huge sports fan – and just so very lucky to dovetail my passion and get paid for it as well.'