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Thank you 5Live. I discovered via FourFourTwo magazine that Stuart Hall was approaching his 80th birthday and waited for something to appear on the TV to commemorate this great event. And yet, nothing. Ten thousand bloody channels and not one of them could be arsed to screen a tribute to one of the greatest broadcasters in British history.
Because that’s what Stuart Hall is. 5Live rectified this obscenity with a wonderful, hilarious programme broadcast live from the home of his beloved Manchester City. Two glorious hours of stories, legends and laughter. Tributes came from all over the place. Alistair McGowan, Ken Barlow, his North West news nemesis / partner Bob Greaves, John Inverdale, Francis Lee, Mike Summerbee.
Hall is a huge City fan and enjoyed many a night out with the City stars of the time including Lee and Summerbee, as they relayed some of the old tales. The programme also told us a few things not many of us knew about the man. He was a decent player and was offered terms by Crystal Palace. He told of Mystic Meg admitting to him that she knew nothing about astrology. In the days before she became Mystic Meg.
Hall’s story telling skills are prodigious and the two hour format gave him (and others) ample opportunity to get some of the more hilarious ones out. Fred Eyre, a former player turned writer, told the famous tale of his ‘brief foray into the travel business’. Stuart Hall International Travel was part of the Manchester retail landscape for a while. Including the large sign placed in one of Manchester’s busiest access points which emphasised the acronym S-H-I-T to the many passers by.
But the programme really centred on the two main reasons people like me know and love the man. His radio match reports and It’s A Knockout (not coming from the North West I can’t add much about his many years as a news anchor for the region). His match reports aren’t really worthy of such a mundane title. They are wonderful, poetic vignettes, regardless of whether the match was rotten or regal. No other football reporter could do it or get away with it if they tried.
The programme gave us some marvellous examples including a recent Wigan v West Brom where the awfulness was broken by “Robinson, having a fit of the vapours”, which seemed to translate into the setting up of a goal. My favourite line in the programme was from an old Man Utd match, where Hall informed listeners of “Wilkins, wandering around the midfield like a Parisian boulevardier looking for a courtesan.”
His interviews are often magnificently baffling to most football managers but he was once matched by Mick McCarthy. Hall had given a splendidly fruity description of the Wolves manager’s stylish attire before remarking that must be pleased. “With my appearance or the point?” responded McCarthy, drolly. But he could also be incisive behind the bonhomie, once telling then Liverpool boss Graeme Souness after a defeat “If you don’t win the next game Graeme... you’re out!” Another clip from the early 70s had Hall delicately asking George Best about his problems in a most masterful way. Back in 2009 Hall poignantly described Best as having “a mind like a vexed sea. He never found calm waters.”
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But it was It’s A Knockout which gave Hall his national stardom. The programme ran from 1971 to 1982 and expanded to include Jeux Sans Frontieres, the European Cup to It’s A Knockout’s Premier League. For those too young (or too middle class) to remember it was essentially towns in the UK and across Europe doing battle in the most crackpot games devised for the telly. The show garnered huge ratings and large crowds would turn up for the competitions. Hall was the ringmaster of the UK version and commentator on JSF. Well, I say commentator, mostly he simply wept with laughter at the nonsense unfolding before his eyes. Exhibits A & B are below. Anyone who fails to lose it when watching the penguin clip is simply not welcome in my house. His hysterics were perfect and as a kid I just couldn’t wait for each ‘contest’ to come around.
Click here for video clip of the Ostrich. 
Click here for video clip of the Penguins.
Knockout finished in 1982 and he has rarely been seen on national television since. This is saddening. He is a genuine maverick whose intellect, infectious sense of humour and linguistic genius are tailor made for broadcasting. The bosses at BBC TV perhaps saw him as risky and perhaps they were right; he did take risks. In 2005 he courted controversy over comments he made about Zimbabwe on the 5Live sport & comedy programme Fighting Talk. It’s worth reprinting in full
Hall (on receiving a question about which team he’d like to see make a comeback) “Zimbabwe. The average life expectancy is 33 so if you are not dying from Aids, malnutrition, starvation, deprivation or stagnation, don your flannels, black up [and] play leather on willow. [With] Mugabe as captain and witch doctor, imagine him out at Lords casting a tincture of bats' tongues and gorillas' gonads... Give cricket a shot in the bails it needs!"
To which the host Christian O’Connell replied nervously “Let's have a break for the news so we can all think about our careers." This is worth reprinting not to expose Hall as some tired cliche railing against ‘political correctness’. It is to demonstrate that he can be dangerously subversive and hysterically funny at the same time (“casting a tincture of bats' tongues and gorillas' gonads... Give cricket a shot in the bails it needs!" – glorious, unscripted stuff). O’Connell, a decent radio broadcaster, is half his age and for all his laddishness would not have the intellect or gumption to go anywhere near such stuff. He’s bland, in other words.
Blandness has never been Hall’s Achilles heel. He has simply got old in an age where youth dominates and Frankie Boyle can make heavily scripted asides about sexual abuse at 9pm on the BBC. Hall, by contrast, hasn’t had a major presenting role in a generation because, unlike Boyle, you really don’t know what you’re going to get next.
The great man turned 80 on Christmas Day and doubtless, on Boxing Day, he was in some lofty north western perch. Reciting Shelley to illustrate a Kevin Davies flick on or invoking Shakespeare in an interview with Big Sam. I don’t have many heroes in life, but Stuart Hall is one of them. He is Ozymandias, King of Kings.
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