Entertainment For Lively Minds
Footballers in the media
Posted by scrabopower on 8 August 2011 - 2:06pm.
Nipped home for lunch and the subscribers' edition was sitting waiting. Mr Hepworth's superb column was spot-on about the absence of modern footballers in the media. Apart from Beckham I'd struggle to name any premiership footballers that have appeared on, for example the chat show circuit, or game/panel shows.
Apart from vaguely recalling Sky pundit Chris Kamara on Shooting Stars where his sole input was some sexist 1970s banter which clearly had laughter edited onto the end. He thought he was being funny but was spectacularly off the mark.
Any examples out there of footballers embarrassingly out of their depth on non-football related telly?
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But by that …
… does he mean contemporary footballers; players appearing in the media during their playing careers?
I can't think of that many in lifetime — Kevin Keegan maybe. But the height of chat shows and celebrity panel shows was the 1980s; there just aren't that many of those programmes on TV anymore.
Talking of little Kev, here's a highly cringeworthy performance from his Hamburg days (although credit to him for speaking German on TV).
I've not read the column...
...so I don't know if DH mentioned it, but Clarke Carlisle was on Question Time recently.
Clarke Carlisle
Burnley's Clarke Carlisle appeared on, and won, an episode of Countdown, before acquitting himself pretty well as a guest on Question Time earlier this year.
EDIT: Oops - sorry Spartacus. Simultaneous posts.
No problem
I didn't know he'd been on Countdown too. Impressive.
Underplayed
I underplayed his achievements: he won two editions of Countdown, before narrowly losing the third.
As he's the only case anyone has mentioned so far, I guess we've kind of proved David Hepworth's point though...
Whilst we're on the subject...
Here's some footage of fleet-footed LFC bad boy Luis Suarez on the Uraguayan version of fun-house as a child!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/sportvideo/footballvideo/8662812/Liverp...
I suppose...
...there is so much football and so many football related shows compared to The Olden Days that footballers don't need to go on Blankety Blank or Lennie Bennett's Punchlines to get a profile nowadays.
Before a quick interview with Dickie Davies was the best you could hope for, unless you happened to get to the FA Cup Final were you could join in the 8 hour build-up before kick-off.
Financial incentives
Thing is, in the 80s, the likes of Frank McAvennie and John Barnes may well have appeared on Celebrity Squares or The Pyramid Game (can't remember offhand), but this was a time when TV appearance fees would have been relatively higher and footballers' wages relatively lower.
As a result, it was probably worth their while to do a game show. Now there's less money in TV and modern footballers have annual salaries of £1m plus, I can't see why they'd bother.
(Although I do remember Robbie Savage appearing on Blankety Blank once.)
But someone enlighten me
(As I haven't lived in the UK for three-and-a-half years so I'm not to speed on TV.)
How many chat shows and game shows – where celebrities are a permanent feature – are on TV at the moment?
Most panel shows seem to be constructs for people to be funny (such as Mock The Week), satirical (such as HIGNFY) or clever (such as QI). Or combinations of these. None of which you can reasonably expect from the average footballer.
There are enough footballers embarrassingly out of their
depth on Football related telly - let alone non-Football related telly!
I'm not old enough
to remember a lot of TV in the 1970s, but did I miss a golden age where you'd see Charlie George and Malcolm Muggeridge on Late Night Line-Up discussing Harold Pinter?
You must remember...
... Stan Bowles and Rodney Marsh discussing that Dada exhibition at the Tate Modern in 1972 on The Late Review.
I didn't see the programme and can't find a clip
but John Aldridge won a singing contest called "You're A Star" on Irish tv (for charidee, natch).
And over here one of the top media figures is former Millwall midfielder Eamon Dunphy (credits have included: serious political talking shop on the radio, prime time chat show on tv, presenter of an Irish version of "The Weakest Link", respected print journalist, U2 biographer...). Of course Eamo is old school and needed another career. Nowadays footballers neither need the wedge nor do they get giddy in the company of tv stars..
Graeme Souness & Sammy Lee
Once appeared in a episode of Boys from the Black Stuff.
'Out of their depth on
'Out of their depth on non-football related telly?' How about out of their depth on football related telly (and radio.) Step forward, Mr Robbie Savage.
As James "Jim" Royle would say "Sony award my ar*e!!"
yes!
You beat me to it. Savage must have photos of the Director General of the BBC cavorting with a ladyboy or something. How else could he have 'earned' that gig and how on earth does he keep it?
He's not funny and he's not insightful. Half of the time he's barely coherent. He's beyond terrible.
That category
was the only one to be voted for by the public; Savage got his Twitter followers to vote for him.
That...
...Glenn Mulcaire from AFC Wimbledon had a bit a career in the media, didn't he?
I'd struggle to name any premiership footballers...
...
That's it.
I'd just struggle.
Apart from a few who've been in bother (Rooney, Gerrard, Giggs etc)