When Socu-Soap Was Young
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Soundings issue 13 Autumn 1999 Making faces When socu-soap was young Steve Hawes From Billy Wright to Ian Wright, Steve Hawes charts the birth of the football personality The tenth annual Birmingham Theatre conference recently devoted a morning to a discussion of soap opera on television and radio.1 More or less playful anecdotes were swapped, as they usually are, about characters in soaps - as if they were real. Janelle Reinelt, former editor of Theatre Journal, noting the familiarity with which conferees were able to muse on Shula’s rush of blood - not to mention Barbara Windsor’s unmentionables - suggested that in knowingly eliding character, actor and person, we were being ‘...’ She paused before pronouncing a word which neither Word's spellcheck nor the Shorter Oxford acknowledges, but which must have played frequently on the lips of Jean Baudrillard as surely as it did on those of Marcel Mauss before him. We were being ‘ludic’. Playwright Stephen Jeffreys was moved to admit that he had, until that moment, felt remote from the discussion since he (almost) never watched soaps: but then he realised, as a long-term Highbury season ticket holder, that he had for years been engaged by soap opera of a kind. He had thought - until this moment of illumination - that he had merely been indulging his laddish tribal instincts. But now, as he contended with the giddying thought ‘that Ian Wright might be a real person’, he realised that he was ‘simply being ludic’. Like all good jokes this has a ring of truth about it. Indeed, were it delivered straight-faced, without the inverted commas of irony by which the jester denies his own purpose, we might have nodded sagely: not as post-modernists reflecting on signifiers which are and are not at one and the same time, but as assembled observers of ritual suddenly aware that our interlocutor is indicating the ley-line of significant pattern. The question: ‘When does a person become a personality?’; the answer, ‘when s/he has an identity in more than one medium at once: art and life’. Or, one might add, two separate art forms, like 1 dance and drama, something which the choreographer Kenneth Macmillan exploited in his work, notably with Lynne Seymour. Or sport and life. Sportspeople became personalities - actors in more than the drama played out on track or field - at about the same time they began to acquire agents. The timing varied from sport to sport and was partly related to the sportpersons’ capacity to endorse commercial products. Cycling in Europe, baseball and boxing in America, led the way in the 1930s in establishing athletes as, literally, ‘faces’. The rule that interests us here is that the further removed the product was from their sporting activity, the bigger, by definition, the personality rating. Sam Snead’s signature on the head of golf clubs might have had the power to persuade specialist purchasers to part with their money: a broader narrative put Denis Compton’s face on Brylcreem posters. Sporting personalities Soccer stars were relative latecomers into this game. In England it required the players’ release from maximum wage contracts in the early 1960s before they emerged as off-the-field personalities. The few exceptions before then each had a ready-made narrative which took its bearer from the back to the front pages of national newspapers. In the 1940s and 19s Len Shackleton, ‘the clown-prince’ deemed ‘too clever by half’, appeared occasionally on the music hall stage; there was Bert Trautmann, the former POW who broke his neck in the FA Cup Final and, displaying Teutonic valour, played on. But their contemporaries, for all their footballing skills, were distinguished off the pitch by self-effacing uniformity. The 1950 England line-up of Williams, Ramsay, Aston, Wright, Hughes, Dickinson, Matthews, Mortenson, Milburn, Bailey, and Finney were ready to bow their heads and hurry down the tunnel at the end of every game, scarcely pausing to acknowledge the applause. No hint of anything ludic there. Even Billy Wright, who became captain, won a hundred caps and married a Beverley Sister, was the model of the modest, unassuming athlete. 2 But once footballers began to negotiate individual contracts - once they began to acquire agents and, as often as not, a ghost writer for their newspaper column - it started to change. There is a telling comparison between the Manchester United side brutally eliminated from the 1958 European Cup by the Munich air crash and the one which won the competition ten years later. Whereas the former, the Busby Babes, were distinguished off the pitch by nothing so much as their age, the latter contained a few mavericks whose manner on and off the pitch demanded acknowledgement of their individual personalities - among them Pat Crerand, Denis Law and especially George Best. For a few years Best lived as if a pop star. He lived a ‘lifestyle’, the popular press avidly detailing the cars, the bars and the ‘birds’ which defined it; and he purveyed one: he not only sported the latest fashions, he opened a boutique and, next door to it, a hairdresser’s. When this change came, television - unlike the press - was strangely slow to react. The football magazine shows of the 1960s and early 1970s were scarcely magazines at all. They didn’t carry feature items, and restricted coverage to team news and predictions of the following Saturday’s match results, illustrated by clips of the previous season’s corresponding fixture, or discussions of in-form teams in more recent action. These amounted to little more than a montage of moves ending in goals, usually picked up at the set piece, free-kick or throw-in, which began them. Producers, directors and editors of sports programmes - and most of their pundits - still belonged to the maximum wage generation and clung to their attitudes. Football on screen A turning point was the 1973 FA Cup Final. Not so much for the result - though it was, conveniently, a back-to-front-page story: second division Sunderland beating the mighty and merciless Leeds United - as for the man-marketing the underdogs. Paul Doherty was the son of a maximum wage footballer - Northern Ireland international Peter Doherty- who had abandoned his own less than distinguished career as a burly centre-half after brief spells with Bristol City and Doncaster Rovers, and was operating as a journalist-cum-agent in Manchester.2 He wrote for the tabloid press, 3 edited the Manchester City matchday programme, and, crucially, was the agent managing the Sunderland players’ ‘pool’ for their cup run.3 He negotiated the deal with ITV which put cameras on the coach taking the players from their hotel to Wembley, and also guaranteed access to cameras after the game. The insider’s glimpse of the hopes and joys of the players and their manager, which Doherty innovatively put on the screen, shaped coverage from then on. The BBC had been made to look stuffy by comparison - a lesson they quickly learned. By the opening of the 1973-74 season Doherty had become consultant to Granada Television’s sports department. Within two years he was the producer both of The Kick Off Match - Sunday afternoon highlights of Saturday games - and of Kick Off, the Friday night preview show. He moved the latter away from its team news format and demanded at least two feature items a week. What had to be identified (in protagonist/antagonist terms any drama script-editor would applaud) was the ‘match-story’: inevitably a personal story. Whose career was to be made or marred? Who was the player’s principal adversary? What did he have riding on his performance? What did he have to lose? The question ‘How do you feel?’ became proverbial. Sports coverage was becoming sentimental: it needed perceivable feeling. Just as, Kenneth Macmillan decided at about the same time, did The Royal Ballet. Over six or seven years, Macmillan launched a succession of major tear-jerkers, Anastasia, Manon, Romeo and Juliet and Isadora, which deliberately challenged the remote urbanity Frederick Ashton had instilled in the Royal Ballet - and in the process Macmillan turned the dancers into ‘personalities’. In its search for a narrative line which gave meaning to a contest, indeed which transcended the contest itself, Kick Off inevitably courted bathos. The subsequent game often failed to live up to the billing, or the personal drama being pinpointed had more to do with sitcom than soap. The Chester City reserve goalkeeper had played one game, his debut, in the 1975-76 season and had let in seven goals against Ipswich. A year later - it was probably also his birthday - he was called up again to play in the cup and Chester had again drawn Ipswich.4 How did he feel? Well, he was glad of another chance to secure a place. Did he suffer nightmares when he recalled his 4 debut? No he didn’t. Did he remember each one of the goals? No, but he could remember Tony Henry’s back pass which led to the fourth. Was Tony going to be playing tomorrow? No, he’d been transferred to Manchester City. Just as often the match story laid bare dramatic tensions which would have otherwise gone unremarked, especially when the story was heroic failure. Bolton Wanderers were contenders for promotion to the First Division for the third time running in 1976-77. A camera concentrated on a close-up of their manager, Ian Greaves, as he sat on the bench for the deciding fixture. The subsequent montage, showing wave after wave of Bolton near-misses etching themselves on his face, required no commentary.