FOOTBALL ON GRANDSTAND

SAM TODD LOOKS BACK AT A MUCH-LOVED TELEVISION PROGRAMME FROM YESTERYEAR...

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FOR those of us who became hooked on sport by watching BBC One on Saturday afternoons, it can be discombobulating to see the schedules filled with Bargain Hunt, Money For Nothing, Escape To The Country and Garden Rescue repeats.

It's hardly 'Today's Sport As It Happens', as promised 65 years ago - in bold white upper case font over the top of an outside broadcast camera - when the nation settled down to watch what would become the Beeb's flagship sports show and the world's longest running live programme of its kind.

That first edition of Grandstand on October 11, 1958, which came on to the orchestral tune of News Scoop by Len Stevens the iconic baa-buh-bun-bun theme, written at a set of traffic lights while driving to work one morning by Keith Mansfield, didn't come along until October 1975 when it replaced Match of the Day composer Barry Stoller's 1971 successor to News Scoop - featured racing from Ascot and the World Amateur Golf Championship at St Andrews as well as showjumping from Haringey.

However, as original host Peter Dimmock recalled when the programme turned 40 in 1998, football was at the heart of the show's conception.

"We always had live outside broadcasts and they were a feature of Saturday afternoons," Dimmock said. "Paul (Fox, BBC executive) had this idea that it would be a good idea to link the live outside broadcasts from a studio so that we could give half-time football results, racing results and various items throughout the afternoon, and then of course the most important thing of all - the football results on the teleprinter, with everybody at home with their pools coupon seeing the results the moment they came up."