Grandstand (TV programme)
Grandstand was the flagship sports programme of the BBC which was broadcast on Saturday afternoons on BBC1 between 1958 and 2007, and from 1981 on Sunday afternoons as Sunday Grandstand on BBC2, although until 1998 the Sunday edition aired only during the summer.
The last editions of Grandstand and Sunday Grandstand were broadcast over the weekend of 27–28 January 2007.
History
During the 1950s, sports coverage on television in the United Kingdom gradually expanded. The BBC regularly broadcast sports programmes with an outside studio team, occasionally from two or three separate locations. Production assistant Bryan Cowgill put forward a proposal for a programme lasting three hours; one hour dedicated to major events and two hours showing minor events. Outside Broadcast members held a meeting in April 1958, and Cowgill further detailed his plans taking timing and newer technical facilities into consideration. During the development of the programme, problems arose over the proposed schedule which would result in the programme ending at 16:45 to allow children's programmes to go out. Paul Fox insisted that the service was broadcast until 17:00 to ensure a proper results service.Three weeks before the debut of the programme, sports broadcaster Peter Dimmock favoured naming the show Out and About! with Fox persuading Dimmock to agree on a new name, which was Grandstand. Grandstand launched on 11 October 1958 from Lime Grove Studios with Dimmock as the presenter. Dimmock presented the first two editions and three weeks later, he was replaced by sports commentator David Coleman. The early months on air included music, as Fox recalled: "Initially some of the gaps between races were filled by a duo called My Brother & I". In the autumn of 1959, Grandstand was extended by fifteen minutes and would finish at 17:00 every Saturday. According to Richard Haynes in BBC Sport in Black and White, the 1960s saw the Grandstand name "become synonymous with the BBC's coverage of sport" and it "became a trusted vehicle for British viewers to access a variety of sports."
The show was one of the most recognisable on British television, dominating Saturday afternoons on BBC1 and covering nearly every major sporting event in Britain, such as the FA Cup Final, Wimbledon, the Grand National and the University Boat Race, as well as major international events like the Olympic Games, the Paralympic Games, the Commonwealth Games and the FIFA World Cup where the Grandstand name would be used - eg Olympic Grandstand and World Cup Grandstand.
From Grandstand launch until the lifting of restrictions on broadcasting hours by the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications in 1972, sports coverage was one of the few programming areas which was exempt from the broadcasting hours restrictions. Instead, sporting coverage and outside broadcasts were provided with a separate quota of broadcasting hours per year by the Postmaster General. By the mid 1960s this amounted to 350 hours per year. This meant Grandstand was a key part of the BBC's Saturday afternoon schedules, as the time the programme was on the air did not count towards the 50-hour a week restriction on normal broadcasting hours.
The first televised Grand National, in 1960, was the BBC's largest outside broadcast for a sport at the time: Grandstand used 16 cameras to cover the event, and the BBC secured the television rights only after years of negotiations.
Beginning in the early 1980s, a lunchtime BBC Weekend News was included in Grandstand, functioning as a programme break between Football Focus and the start of that week's live events.
Competition from ITV
Between 1965 and 1985, Grandstand faced competition from ITV's World of Sport, which broadcast rival coverage of the FA Cup Final and scheduled a wide range of sports, including novelties and minority events. By the end of the 1980s ITV had stopped broadcasting Saturday afternoon sport in favour of other programmes.Later years and demise
From the 1990s onwards, the programme's scope of sporting coverage began to diminish as the BBC gradually began to lose major broadcasting sports rights, including live Formula One, live FA Cup games, England and county cricket matches, the University Boat Race and the Ryder Cup, particularly to the then emerging Sky Sports, and to ITV and Channel 4. Grandstand was not shown on 20 May 2000 as no major sporting events broadcast by the BBC were taking place. Another day when Grandstand was not shown was 23rd December 1978. This was due to strike action on the Friday which had only ended at 10pm the previous night. BBC1 could not get back on air until 3pm which meant that Grandstand was not shown but there was a Final Score. In 2001 the BBC lost the rights to show weekly highlights of the Premier League although it did regain the rights to show live FA Cup and England football internationals.In October 2001, the head of BBC Sports and Programming Pat Younge announced plans to revamp Grandstand by placing emphasis on broadcasting one particular sport rather than alternating between several sports.
In its final few years, the show was rarely presented from a studio and as such there was no longer a main presenter. The show tended to be broadcast from wherever the main event of the day was taking place. The host would be associated with that feature; for example, Hazel Irvine would host snooker, Suzi Perry for motorcycle racing, Sue Barker for tennis, Clare Balding for racing or rugby league, and John Inverdale for rugby union. The 2004 Summer Olympics were the last Olympic Games to be broadcast as "Olympic Grandstand".
''Football Focus'' and ''Final Score'' part company
In August 2001, the Football Focus section, having been the first feature on Grandstand since 1974, became a separate programme in its own right. This meant that Grandstand start time was now 13:00 rather than 12:15.At the same time, Final Score also become a programme in its own right, running from 16:30, meaning that Grandstand only broadcast between 13:00 and 16:30. "Around the Grounds" and the half time sequence did remain within the Grandstand programme. In 2004, following the success of Sky Sports' Soccer Saturday featuring reports from the afternoon's football matches, the BBC introduced its own football scores programme called Score. It ran for the full duration of the afternoon's football matches, beginning at 14:30, and was available as an add-on service on the Red Button until 16:30 when BBC One joined it, at which point Score would become Final Score.
2006 announcement
On 24 April 2006, the BBC announced that Grandstand would be gradually phased out after nearly fifty years, due to the increasing use of interactive services and the need to meet the challenges of the digital, on-demand world. This had been hinted at by the dropping of the "Grandstand" title from the BBC's coverage of the major international sporting events, like that year's Winter Olympics and Commonwealth Games.It was originally intended that the show would end in 2009, but this was brought forward to 28 January 2007.
Since 2007, media and sporting figures have sometimes suggested that Grandstand should be revived by the BBC, in order to help minority sports that no longer receive wide exposure outside of the Olympic Games. In 2017, Gabby Logan named gymnastics, hockey, swimming and diving as sports particularly deserving of Grandstand-style coverage.