Farewell Football Focus

How to destroy a tv show (and what this tells us)

I stopped watching it years ago, so I won’t pretend to be angry or sad at the termination of Football Focus. If anything, when I read about its cancellation, my first reaction was one of surprise that it was still going.

Still, I will forgive myself a slight nostalgic twinge. The first presenter, way back in 1974, was ex-Arsenal goalie Bob Wilson. He became a feature of my childhood, even if I did switch allegiance to ‘Saint and Greavsie,’ sometime in the mid 1980s.

I suspect that I am not as cultured as the people who run the BBC. Their youth may have been spent playing Mozart on the bassoon and translating Homer’s Odyssey into Serbo-Croat from the original Greek, or vice versa, but mine wasn’t. My childhood was spent outdoors playing when it was sunny and indoors playing, reading or watching tv when it rained. I grew up in England, so a lot of time was spent indoors and I watched a lot of tv.

The pull of Bob Wilson going through the week’s football, was powerful enough to keep me inside, even on a rare sunny day. I can’t remember a single episode now, but I would talk about it and Match of the Day and the Big Match, when I caught up with my friends.

I still watch football, but other interests and priorities gradually kicked in. By the time Football Focus was hosted by Dan Walker, I had moved on.

BBC exec Alexi Kay Jelski, isn’t wrong when he talks about ‘changing audience behaviours.’ As a teenager I had the choice of only three tv channels and the internet didn’t exist. My children rarely watch live tv and run two of their own Youtube channels. It’s a different world.

Was Football Focus simply a victim of that? Believable and yet somehow it wasn’t quite adding up, so I did some checking. In 2020-1 it still had 1.12 million viewers, by 2023 that had fallen below 600,000. Tech changes our behaviour quickly, but not that quickly.

Perhaps Alexi Kay Jelksi would have some more answers and so I read on, but started to blur somewhere around the phrase ‘a key role in the telling of the stories of the game..’

Picture a busy pub on the weekend, an angry lager swilling man is shouting at the TV screen.

“Wots he talking about? This f’x@ing Twx! thinks Haarland is a better/worse finisher than Alan Shearer, he needs his fuxkxng head examining, the soppy f@c*ng gobsh*tx "

“Nah, mate, you’re wrong,” replies his friend, “he’s playing a key role in the telling of the stories of the game.”

Jelski then got on to Alex Scott. We were reassured that she is ‘brilliant’ and ‘one of our finest presenters.’ Hmm.

Some of the abuse aimed at her is about race and sex, particularly sex. Racists and sexists won’t ever like her, but not liking her doesn’t mean that you are racist or sexist. The popularity of Gaby Roslin, Kelly Cates, Ian Wright etc suggests there is more to it than that.

I would back Scott in a football quiz vrs Dan Walker, but on the few occasions I watched her host, I soon switched over. Not because of her specifically: rather, because the show was so boring. Did they really think that Football Focus was the right vehicle to educate the ignorant proles about social justice? When an audience doesn’t like the presenter or the new content, there are at least two things I can think of to try, before scrapping the show.

Simon Jordan, never one to avoid a controversy, said the show had become ‘vacuous, uninspiring, uninformative.’ Dear BBC, I cannot forgive you for making me agree with Simon Jordan.

For someone who doesn’t care about Football Focus, you have gone on about it an awful lot, I hear you cry. Yes, it’s just a tv programme, but it’s not an isolated incident, it’s yet another breadcrumb leading us back to a disconnected elite.

Politicians aren’t the only ones living in their own safe little bubble, performing those beliefs they want to be seen holding. It’s like taking a selfie as you eat a vegan burger at a Morrissey gig, with a pork chop saved in your back pocket for later.

The media and the arts are generally two steps ahead of politicians. If they are willing to crash and burn televisual institutions rather than lose face amongst their coterie, we need to pay close attention to their actions.

During my life time I have watched Britain become a more outward looking, more tolerant, much nicer place. And now I am watching it become a more insular, less tolerant, nastier place. There are many causes, and when they write the history of the nastification of Great Britain 2010-2026, Football Focus will not even make a footnote. The constant, crass attempts at ‘improving’ the working classes by an upper-middleclass cultural elite, will be worth a chapter or two.

I return to my semi-fictional pub character. “F’ off. Just let me watch me football in peace.”

Better to finish though, on that avuncular presence from my childhood, Bob Wilson. Speaking to the Times he said: ‘I am really disappointed it has come to this. The BBC has said it will be replaced next season by an interview show about what makes footballers tick. That is crazy.’