TV's Tartan army
FRANK KEATING
As well as the boy Rooney, another young Englishman has done good. Mick Channon is now a seriously good racehorse trainer and could be seen under his topper putting his Wessex vowels cheerfully about in the royal enclosure at Ascot last week. A couple of decades ago, Mick was simply a former England footballer and occasional television pundit when he immortally summed up the performance of one of his successors at centre-forward. 'The boy Lineker done good,' proclaimed Channon to the nation. The boy Lineker is still doing good as the BBC's frontman at the footer fest in Portugal, which has had the country surfing on a switchback wave of fluctuating passions and multiplied a thousandfold the supermarket sixpack sales of lager (plus a chaser of the hard stuff, if you please, just to settle the nerves).
The match within a match has bright, bushy-tailed Gary Lineker challenging the grey and grizzled old champ from ITV Des Lynam, but in truth it has not been a fair contest because when Des should have been orchestrating his cogent cut and thrusts fore and aft and in the middle of a match, his commercial channel has to rush away to run its interminably dreary one-track advertisements featuring either Beckham or the aforesaid beers. Lynam transferred from the BBC for a fortune, but the ads hardly give him time to compose a single sentence comprising a noun. adjective and verb. He must be ticking up a few grand for every word he utters, but riches cannot upturn the droop in his sad moustache, and after this tournament the one-time monarch will be winking at different cameras.
What if the Scotland team had qualified and not England? Would their studios have been full of former English players passing judgment? No, as they say in football, way. English viewers on both channels have to put up with mostly incomprehensible Tartan mumblings. It takes an age to catch up with and tune into the Jock drift and McLingo of the mournfully humourless Hansen, as saturnine and troubled as a reformed Ruritanian bloodsucker, or his carrot-topped sidekick Strachan. ITV's pipsqueak Harry Lauder figure McCoist is just as impenetrable till you have adjusted your set. Even the interviews down in the stadium dungeons and dugouts are conducted by Scottish lassies. The only relief from these Clydebank
bores is an amiably lolling Great Dane of a one-time goalkeeper with a big nose and no critical bite to him and, wouldn't you know, two former captains of Ireland and know-all purveyors of the bleedin. obvious, Townsend and Lawrenson. I am not saying, mind you, that the few Englishmen to get a look in have been any great shakes — serially sacked manager Reid looks as if he's come straight from a hard day driving his hearse, light-relief Wright wriggles about as if on permanent audition for Son of Blue Peter, and as for wise-ancient Sir Bobby Robson's inter-round summaries, well, 'whispering death' ain't in it and I have hardly caught a word he's uttered. 'How's your heart, Bobby?' asked ITV commentator Tyldesley towards the hectic end of England v. France. 'Not too good,' feebly croaked the knight, never to be heard again that evening.
BBC's main man at the mike, Matson, is now in his squawking 25th year as England's flagwaver-in-chief, but has yet to describe his boys actually winning anything against these beastly, too cagily competent foreigners. Motty's untiringly devoted jingoism puts me in mind of that crisp five-word theatre review by Dorothy Parker on a one-man Broadway show by a German actor — 'Guido Natzo was natzo guido.' But the boy Lineker done good.
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