7 DECEMBER 1991, Page 55

SPECTATOR SPORT

Perfect chemistry

Frank Keating

IN DAVID'S gurgling Colemanspeak it is reallyquiteremarkable' that a diverting lit- tle quiz has become the most consistently Popular programme in BBC television's output apart from the enduring soap operas, Neighbours and EastEnders. More often than not, twice as many people watch A Question of Sport on Tuesday evenings as stay put for the 9 o'clock news which fol lows it. Up to four times as many fret over canoeing or darts questions with Bill Beau- mont and Ian Botham as were bothered to watch BBC's flagship current affairs pro- gramme Panorama the night before. QoS has been running longer than the two aforesaid soaps put together. This New Year it celebrates its 22nd birthday. For the first show, in January 1970, captains were Cliff Morgan and Henry Cooper, and their guests Tom Finney, George Best, Raymond Illingworth and the vivacious young Olympic runner who was to die of cancer within the year, Lillian Board. The chair- man was David Vine. Coleman took over in 1979. Willie Carson, Emlyn Hughes and Gareth Edwards have been other popular captains down the years, but the present weekly josh between Beaumont and Both- am seems perfect chemistry — the affable, clubhouse teddy-bear against the taproom laddo with the lathe and competitive edge.

Botham has surprised his friends with sortie diligent swotting of late. It has been

necessary, for Beaumont is one of those who has poured over the small print of the sports pages all his life. Beaumont's blind spot on QoS, however, has regularly been in identifying the 'mystery guest' in an obscurely shot clip of film. He once confi- dently named Anne Hobbs, the tennis play- er, as Jim Watt, the boxer. And he mistook Steve Cram for Christine Evert. Although the biggest boob in that regard was when Emlyn Hughes identified a picture of Princess Anne on horseback as the jockey, Johnny Reid. (When the Princess herself took part, in 1987, a phenomenal 18 million were watching — three million more than for that year's Grand National.)

They record two programmes, back to back, every other Sunday at the BBC's Manchester studios. The guests each get a fee of £125, so it is a cheap bit of program- ming. The recordings are prefaced by a canteen lunch and free drinks.

The producer, Mike Adley, says: 'When I ring up to ask a guest to appear, I insist it's only a bit of fun and they are expected only to be reasonably competent at answering questions on their own sport. Any sense of competition and challenge is up to Bill and Ian. As a group, the soccer players are the most insecure guests, worried almost to a man that if they muff their questions they will be ribbed without mercy when they get back to their mates in the dressing-room.'

Nobody has ever refused to appear on the show — for which there is a two-year waiting-list for tickets to watch a recording. Once the boxing champion, Herol Graham, went down with severe food poisoning at noon on the Sunday of recording. 'I rang every gym in east London trying to get Terry Marsh to fly up,' says Adley. He did. Another Sunday morning, the footballer Paul Gascoigne telephoned Adley blearily from his bed in London to say he had 'flu. At that time, the programme's reserve, its `ringer', was the Everton footballer and captain, Kevin Ratcliffe, who had agreed to `drop everything' and hotfoot it to the stu- dio in case of such an emergency.

Currently, the show's permanent 'ringer is the Manchester footballer, Bryan Rob- son. Says the enthusiast Adley: 'Just think, the captain of England and his generation's finest ever player on permanent stand-by for a little quiz show like ours.'

Reallyquiteremarkable.