Coleman career was remarkable indeed

TV Watch with Dave O’Connell

Given that it seems to be in our DNA to pillory anyone who dares to succeed in their chosen pursuit, David Coleman must have been a real star – because few sports presenters attracted such attention outside of their own field.

Spitting Image led the way but Private Eye’s weekly Colemanballs – a series of his gaffes that eventually grew to incorporate all sporting silliness – often meant that more people associated the broadcaster with cock-ups than commentary.

And the truth was exactly the opposite – because in many ways, Coleman was the original of the species, the one who set the template for a golden generation that followed.

The Quite Remarkable David Coleman, narrated by John Humphrys, was BBC1’s tribute to their star who died on December 21 last year, after a broadcasting career that included eleven Olympics, starting in Rome in 1960 and finishing in Sydney in 2000.

He was the voice of soccer in the Sixties and Seventies; the only man we knew here because he was the commentator on the FA Cup Final, which was about the only live soccer we got on the box.

He was the voice of the World Cup too, and more than once his commentary on the clip of Gordon Banks’ incredible save from Pele at the Mexico World Cup in 1970 featured in this tribute – the one where Banks dived low to his right and somehow pushed the ball over the crossbar instead of around the post for one of the greatest saves of all time.

The BBC called him a pioneer of sports broadcasting and this tribute showed why – he was there when they first used satellite to beam live match pictures back into studio, he was there when they conquered the autocue.

He introduced slow motion to athletics – although he had to laugh when the first shot at this simply jumped the field in the 100 metres from ten yards short of the line to all of them well past it – and he was the king of what they used to call the teleprinter.

This was a forerunner of the vidiprinter that now runs like ticker tape along the bottom of Final Score or Sky – and all it was, was Coleman standing beside a fax machine as it banged out match updates from around the county.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.