Part 1: What would Tony Wilson do?
“The only other person I think they could have got in to do it was Tony Wilson, who was a legend, not only at Granada, but in the music industry as well. And he thrived on the unpredictable. I don’t know if Tony was approached, or if he would have wanted to do it, but it’s an interesting thought.”
Elton Welsby interview, February 16, 2023
Around this time last year, I interviewed Elton Welsby while researching and writing an article for When Saturday Comes magazine about the first edition of Granada Goals Extra.
Welsby was generous with his time and his memories, giving me plenty of great detail about that first show, broadcast in 1991, and how it fell to pieces. It had been conceived as a reinvention of the football highlights programme, showing action from multiple matches at teatime on a Saturday, within minutes of the final whistle. But that first edition was so bad that attempts would later be made, semi-successfully, to erase it from existence.
During a chat lasting three-quarters of an hour, Welsby and I meandered on to the subject of what Goals Extra might have been like with Tony Wilson presenting it, and how a man who thrived on performing live and unscripted, who introduced the first television performance by the Sex Pistols, who became such a significant cultural figure that there is now a Tony Wilson Place in central Manchester, would have handled the chaos of a football highlights show being flung together as it was on air.
And the thing is, there’s no right answer here. There was the Tony Wilson who, during a particularly heated edition of the 1990s Friday night debate show Granada Upfront, was sent flying by the wrestler Kendo Nagasaki, then got up, dusted himself down and continued calmly with the next link. And there was the Tony Wilson who got so flustered that he swore twice during a Granada afternoon news bulletin in 2003 when he thought his microphone was off, and never read the news again.
There was the Tony Wilson who, in the words of his one-time Granada Reports colleague Richard Madeley, “would surge in as the opening titles rolled, doing up his shirt buttons, putting his tie straight, sit down and be Mr Perfection”. And there was the Tony Wilson who in March 1980, during his brief stint as a reporter for World In Action, reportedly made a complete mess of interviewing the Conservative industry secretary Keith Joseph. Such a mess, that the interview is immortalised in a scene in the film 24 Hour Party People where Wilson, played by Steve Coogan, insultingly calls Joseph “the Mad Monk”.
Wilson, a Manchester United supporter and not shy about publicising it, didn’t do much sports presenting during his extraordinary career. He was the news reporter who went on to the streets of Liverpool to break the news to shocked fans of Bill Shankly’s resignation in 1974, and he did a series of the 70s nostalgia show Best and Marsh: The Perfect Match in 1988. Other than that, he generally stuck to doing just about everything else.
Perhaps on a show that teetered on the edge of the precipice as Goals Extra did, and tumbled over it several times, Wilson’s maverick tendencies would have been one unpredictable element too many. Or perhaps it might just have been the greatest sports programme ever.
But when Goals Extra emerged blinking into the world at around 5.10pm on Saturday, August 17, 1991, there was no Tony Wilson involved. He missed possibly the most bizarre programme aired in Granada’s long history.
That programme was the creation of one man. His name was Paul Doherty.
Part 2: ‘The hardest man in television’
“He was just fantastic. At the end of the day, his ideas were better than anybody else’s ideas, so you couldn’t point the finger at him! He always had a good idea.”
Don Jones, sports producer, remembers Paul Doherty, interview by granadaland.org, August 18, 2015
I never met Paul Doherty, Granada Television’s head of sport from the mid-1970s to 1994, and I’m still not sure, eight years on from his death, whether I’m sad or relieved that I didn’t. I suspect I wouldn’t have lasted 10 minutes working for him. Maybe that says more about me.
The stories I’ve heard about him are extraordinary. Rob Palmer, Granada’s commentator for three years in the 1990s before beginning a long and successful association with Sky, described him on a 2018 podcast as: “The hardest man in television. He’s the only man I’ve seen Alex Ferguson cower to.”
Welsby, on Twitter in 2021, recalled an incident in the 80s where Doherty was threatened by a drunken Jocky Wilson, the darts player, in the bar at Granada, and responded by throwing him out of the building. “Jocky’s agent found him in the car park,” Welsby tweeted. “Not injured as such: dumped.”
Don Jones, a sports producer, remembered when a planned item for a Friday night programme fell through on the Thursday, and Doherty kept everyone in the office past midnight until they came up with an idea he thought was at least acceptable.
Yet Jones also put his subsequent career successes down to what he learned working for Doherty.
As he put it an interview for the website granadaland.org: “If you look at the people who worked for him, most people went on and did good things in other parts of television and you won’t find anybody who worked for him that would slag him off.”
Watch any of Granada’s sports output from the Doherty era, and although it doesn’t always look particularly slick, his programmes fizz with energy and ideas.
In the early 1990s, one of Doherty’s ideas was a new type of highlights programme – one that pushed at the limits of both the technology of the time and ITV’s exclusive contract with the Football League.
Part 3: The TV deal that was more loophole than contract
“A great week of sport kicks off with a brand new programme for north west soccer fans. Granada Goals Extra presents the goals and highlights from many of the region’s games in a fast-moving new series which begins 30 minutes after the final whistle has blown.”
Stockport Express, August 14, 1991
ITV had signed a four-year deal with the Football League, which at that point still included the top flight, in 1988. The deal was for 18 live league matches per season, plus three more from the League Cup, including the final. There was no provision for a regular highlights show – those were left for the ITV regional companies at their discretion to organise, film, schedule and pay for.
It was a contract full of loopholes. In December 1989, for instance, ITV failed to come to an agreement to show Liverpool’s match against Manchester United live in a Saturday 12.30pm slot for a fee of £196,000. Instead, they paid a £25,000 highlights fee, and somehow managed to show the full 90 minutes on delay from 1.40pm – starting the broadcast while the live match was still going on.
Doherty spotted another loophole. Although there was a blackout on showing Saturday 3pm games live, there was nothing to stop the broadcasting of highlights at 5pm. During the 1990-91 season, Granada put out three extended edited highlights shows in a Saturday tea-time slot including, most remarkably, the Third Division play-off final from Wembley between Bolton and Tranmere, which went to extra time, meaning the programme started before the match ended.
For the start of the 1991-92 season, Doherty decided to take the idea one stage further. Rather than just show highlights of single match, why not use the advances in electronic technology to broadcast action from multiple games?
“The Football League didn’t like it, but there was nothing they could do,” Welsby told me. “John Bromley [the head of sport] at LWT had signed the contract for ITV, and someone from the Football League had signed it at their end, and there was this massive loophole that you could show Football League highlights at teatime on a Saturday.”
Welsby, as Granada’s main sports presenter, with years of regional and national live television experience behind him, was the natural choice to front the new programme. There was only one problem. He wasn’t available to do it.
Part 4: ‘He picked Bob because of his reputation. He was idolised by north west viewers’
“Bob Greaves was the most famous television face in the north west through the 1970s and 80s. Everybody knew him. Wherever he went, people wanted to shake his hand or simply shout out his name. He always responded with a smile and a chirpy quip. In a street research study, a staggering 96 per cent of people in the region could name him from a photograph.”
Gordon Burns, writing Bob Greaves’ obituary for the Independent, Friday, March 18, 2011
In 1991, Elton Welsby was ITV’s network football presenter, and as part of his duties, hosted the national Saturday results service from London. He couldn’t be in two places at once, so Doherty needed someone else to front his new show.
He decided the solution lay not in Granada’s sports department, but in the news team. Bob Greaves was an experienced and versatile presenter and journalist, best known as the long-serving anchor on the regional news magazine Granada Reports.
“He picked Bob because of his reputation,” Welsby told me last year. “He was idolised by north west viewers. “Bob liked football. He wasn’t a fanatic. But he liked football, and in my absence, he was the obvious choice to do the show.” It was at this point that we speculated about possible alternatives to Greaves, and how Tony Wilson might have done instead. But as Welsby noted, there was no evidence he was ever asked to do it, or could (or would) have done it.
With Greaves in place as the presenter, Doherty’s biggest challenge was to sort out the programme’s logistics. This was an era when matches were recorded on to tape, and the sending of footage from out on location back to the studios electronically was expensive. Some matches would be fed down pre-booked lines, so they could at least be edited while in progress; for others, motorcycle couriers would collect tapes from the grounds at half-time and full-time, then race to the nearest Granada base.
The show’s main base was chosen with political thoughts in mind. Goals Extra would come not from Manchester, but from studios at Liverpool’s Albert Dock. The ITV franchises were up for renewal, with decisions due in the October, and Granada was trying to fight off a rival bid led by Phil Redmond, creator of Liverpool-based soap Brookside, by proving it wasn’t excessively Manchester-centric.
And so everything was set up for the big launch, on the opening Saturday of the 1991-92 league season. It was a busy day for Granada’s sports department, which was also producing two and a half hours of live coverage of the Bass Masters, an annual televised crown green bowls tournament, from Ellesmere Port. The bowls was considered a big enough deal that Welsby had been pulled away from the ITV results service, for one week only, to present it. But Doherty stuck with Greaves for the first edition of Goals Extra.
Was there a danger of Granada’s sports team being over-stretched?
Part 5: Launch day
“I remember pressing the button in edit five to eject the tape… I remember pressing eject, grabbing the tape and running down the corridor into VTO telecine and half-throwing it across the room. This was the transmission. He rammed it in a machine, I remember, and within seconds it was on the air. That’s how close it was.”
Ian Hunton, Granada video tape editor, interview with granadaland.org about an unspecified football highlights show with a very tight deadline, February 18, 2014
While researching the piece I wrote for When Saturday Comes last year, I learned a fair bit about how Goals Extra was put together. It sounded a fraught business, with everybody – reporters, tape editors, the presenter, the director, the production team – flying by the seat of their pants.
“Oh god, it was a stressful show,” Welsby said when I interviewed him. “It was a hiding to nothing.”
For that first edition, on the opening day of the 1991-92 season, a lead match was picked – Liverpool, the previous season’s runners-up, at home to Oldham Athletic, just promoted as Second Division champions. A line to Anfield was booked, so the pictures could be viewed and edited back at Albert Dock as they came in. Clive Tyldesley watched the full 90 minutes from a voiceover booth at the studio, and did a live ‘off-air’ commentary – in other words, because the game was going to be cut down to around two or three minutes, he only started commentating when it looked as if something significant might happen. Doing this commentary live, rather than dubbing it on afterwards, saved vital minutes in the editing process, and freed up Tyldesley at full-time to prepare a voiceover on another match.
Meanwhile, as other footage came in, reporters would stand in the doorway between edit suites, watching two matches at once, picking out key incidents for the tape editors, and scribbling down notes for voiceovers.
In addition, a link had been set up with Central Television – who were two weeks away from starting their own Goals Extra programme – to feed footage from Manchester City’s away match at Coventry, and Everton’s visit to Nottingham Forest.
In total, Granada had action to show from nine matches. Some of the edits would be completed while the show was on air. It needed calmness and quick thinking in the presenter’s chair to hold it all together.
Bob Greaves had plenty of live TV experience. He had authority, and he conveyed warmth and enthusiasm. Surely it’d be all right on the night.
Except…
There was something Doherty hadn’t factored in.
“Bob didn’t understand the show,” Welsby told me. “He thought the links were going to come up on the autocue, and it would just be ‘and here are the highlights’. Bob didn’t realise it was on a wing and a prayer, totally ad-libbed from start to finish.”
Part 6: The show that goes wrong
“Right… what happened was… Micky Gynn sidefooted… here it comes… and it’s in… over the h… hands and head… oh, that was Niall Quinn… that was Niall Quinn’s goal… that was Niall Quinn’s goal.”
Bob Greaves, Granada Goals Extra, August 17, 1991
Despite the number of times I’ve written about that first edition of Goals Extra (too many times: at least twice on my old WordPress blog, and once for When Saturday Comes, in addition to several Twitter posts), there’s a lot I don’t know about it.
For instance, I don’t know for certain what time it started: Some newspaper TV listings from the time say 5.10pm, others say 5.15pm.
Depending on which is correct, the show went out in either a 15- or 20-minute slot, but I don’t know the programme’s exact length: The ITV Archive website is generally excellent at listing the running times of programmes, and does so for every other edition of Goals Extra produced that season. But not the first one.
Nor do I know what Greaves’ first words were as he faced the camera and introduced viewers to the new show.
But thanks to YouTube, and the people who helped me research the piece for When Saturday Comes, and my own memories, and the memories of others, there’s a fair bit I do know.
On YouTube, there is a compilation of clips from that first edition, taking from a home recording, and running at just under five minutes. It doesn’t contain everything that went wrong, but it gives enough of a flavour. And things start to go wrong very quickly.
Firstly, they go wrong with the sound. Something goes awry with the crowd noise during the second-half highlights from Liverpool’s match with Oldham. As Ray Houghton heads an equaliser, Tyldesley’s commentary is accompanied by what sounds like a nuclear explosion. It’s the same again with John Barnes’ winner. Maybe just a glitch. Maybe everything will be fine.
Coverage of the next match passes without incident, as Rob McCaffrey does a voiceover report on Manchester United’s victory over Notts County. Then comes trouble.
Central have only been able to provide first-half action from the games at Nottingham Forest and Coventry. It means Everton’s goal at the City Ground can be shown, but not Forest’s two in the second half (there’s a letter of complaint about this in the following Saturday’s Liverpool Echo, unsurprisingly, from a Liverpool fan).
It’s not such an issue with the action from Highfield Road, where Manchester City have won 1-0, with the only goal scored in the first half. But because the action has come in late, no-one’s had time to record a voiceover. Which means Greaves has to improvise one live. And somehow, there’s been a communication breakdown between him and the production team as to what happens in the clip.
So Greaves tells us that the winning goal is a sidefooted finish by Coventry’s Micky Gynn, as the pictures show Manchester City’s Niall Quinn scoring with a header.
There’s only one game to show from Division Two – Alistair Mann commentates smoothly off-tube on a draw between Blackburn Rovers and Portsmouth. But as we drop into Division Three, the gremlins surface again.
Tyldesley is brought back to do a live voiceover on Bolton’s draw with Huddersfield, and does a good job of negotiating his way through footage he seems to be watching for the first time, only to be tripped up when the edit halts and cuts to a black screen while he is part way through describing Tony Philliskirk’s late equaliser. He manages to round off as quickly as he can, but is still finishing his sentence as Greaves reappears on screen.
Then comes Stockport County’s 5-0 win over Swansea City. Greaves, in his handover, doesn’t make it clear enough when he’s finished speaking, so talks over the start of McCaffrey’s live voiceover. McCaffrey, again clearly seeing the pictures for the first time, has made sure he is well prepared enough with facts and figures to keep talking while he works out what’s going on, greeting an Andy Kilner penalty with the information that Stockport had won 10 of their 11 pre-season friendlies, a schedule that sounds utterly exhausting. But then with four goals down and one to go, the edit cuts out, leaving McCaffrey hanging in mid-sentence. There’s an audible sigh, the screen turns from black to blue, and very faintly in the background, a director or producer can be heard to say: “Just get out to Bob.”
Just Division Four to go.
In the division’s game of the day, Crewe have won 7-4 at league newcomers Barnet, but there’s no footage from that game, as there’s no agreement with London Weekend Television, which has a camera there for its own highlights show, to provide any. However, Granada has managed to get first-half footage back from the games at Rochdale and Blackpool.
Once again, Greaves has to do live voiceovers on clips he hasn’t previously seen. This time, he takes no chances.
From Blackpool, we get Phil Horner’s opener in a 3-0 victory over Walsall. Greaves says simply: “And here’s our action from that game.”
The footage from Rochdale’s 1-1 draw contains goalkeeper Kevin Dearden turning a free-kick over the bar, and Glenn Naylor’s headed goal for York from an Ian Blackstone cross.
Greaves’ voiceover goes as follows: [Two-second pause as Dearden saves] “This is the goal against Rochdale… coming up now…” [three-second pause] “long ball up…” [two-second pause] “nice move…” [pause] “cuts it across…” [pause] “that was easy… I could have scored that.”
That’s as much footage as is publicly available of the programme, but it doesn’t seem to have been the end of the cock-ups. The blogger Mike Clarke recalls the production team running out of footage with a minute or so of the show still to run, requiring Greaves to improvise on the spot a summing up of the day’s action. He talked a bit about Oldham giving Liverpool a scare, and managed to get through to the end titles.
Doherty’s big idea had fallen apart. He was not a happy man.
Part 7: The inquest at Elton Welsby’s house
“Now if there’s one thing I want you get across, it’s this. Don’t be too hard on Bob Greaves. He was incredibly popular. If Bob had stood as an independent MP in Lancashire, he would have walked it. So don’t put him in a bad light. He was a great TV presenter.”
Elton Welsby interview, February 16, 2023
Welsby told me the story that he got back to his Wirral home from presenting the bowls to find Doherty and Tyldesley waiting for him, along with production assistant Jean Wallace. In his hand, Doherty had the tape of that first Goals Extra.
“If you knew my boss, he didn’t take prisoners,” Welsby said. “He was a perfectionist.
“He came over and he had the video in his hand, and said: ‘You didn’t see it, did you?’ I said: ‘No, I didn’t see it.’ And he said: ‘Well, look at this.’
“His future wife, Jean, had been working with me at the bowls, and she was there, and we couldn’t stop giggling. And Paul Doherty looked like he was going to kill us.
“No disrespect to Bob Greaves, though – he was a news and current affairs man. To be thrown into that and not told that this isn’t like presenting Granada Reports was tough. Jean and I were watching it in my lounge, and were giggling, but we were more giggling at Paul Doherty.”
Greaves was given another two weeks, but go no better. On his third and final show, at the end of August, he mixed up Manchester City’s Ian Brightwell with his athlete father Robbie, renamed Anders Limpar as “Andres” and mangled results (“Rochdale 1 Lincoln 1… ah, Rochdale 1 Lincoln 0, I should say”). As his final show ran out of time, he began reading out a news item about Shrewsbury Town, and was faded out mid-link. McCaffrey replaced him at the beginning of September. Welsby, having been replaced as ITV’s network football presenter, was free to take over from the start of the 1992-93 season, and hosted the show for the rest of its life.
Goals Extra had three runs – the first ending in December 1993, the second from September 1994 to December 1996, the third from January to May 1998. For a certain generation of football fan in a certain part of the country, it’s fondly remembered to this day, as much for its foul-ups as its football.
Virtually all of its editions survive intact at the ITV Archive in Leeds. But not quite all of them.
Part 8: The tape that went missing
“Having watched Granada Goals Extra on Saturday, the verdict from the fans was loud and clear: ‘Bring on Phil Redmond’… This latest effort has to be the worst produced football programme I have ever seen…”
AD Mitchell, Bramhall, letter to the Manchester Evening News, published August 28, 1991
Around 1994, a journalist friend went to Granada to interview Welsby for a magazine feature, and was invited to see how the sports team put together their football programmes.
The journalist remembered that first edition of Goals Extra, had seen it, and been transfixed by its sheer awfulness, and wanted to see it again. Attempting a subtle approach, he asked casually if it was knocking around anywhere, as he recalled it fondly.
Around the office, there were gasps, sharp intakes of breath, a collective shaking of heads. Everyone knew immediately what the journalist’s game was. He was told that the tape had been safely locked away, and the Greaves never wanted it shown again.
And 33 years on from the initial broadcast, and 13 years after Greaves’ death, it still hasn’t resurfaced. ITV has the programme listed in its archive, but the tape corresponding to its catalogue number contains an episode from 1998. It doesn’t have anything corresponding to Greaves’ second edition stored at all.
Strangely, ITV’s archive department does have a physical copy of his third and final edition, in which he still makes plenty of errors, so if there was an attempt to remove all traces of his presence on Goals Extra, it wasn’t thorough enough.
Welsby retains a lot of affection and professional respect for Greaves, and asked me not to be too hard on him when I wrote my When Saturday Comes article. Certainly, I was conscious of how bad it could look to be kicking someone who is no longer around to defend himself. I was conscious too, though, that in a broadly successful career, it’s the blips that can make the most compelling stories.
Part 9: The legend becomes fact
“Well, seven weeks is hardly a long time to be given a chance in any job.”
Brian Clough, Goodbye Mr Clough, Yorkshire Television, September 12, 1974
“I presented live football on ITV from 1986 to 1992, even sat next to Cloughie, and that was a piece of piss compared to doing Granada Goals Extra.”
Elton Welsby interview, February 16, 2023
“If we had rehearsed, I would have noticed that none of your fucking red lights were working, guys.”
Tony Wilson, Granada Reports, March 18, 2003
There’s still plenty of information (and footage) missing regarding that first Goals Extra. But there’s enough to fill in the blanks.
And what is obvious is that Bob Greaves was the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. He’d never hosted a sports highlights programme before, and he never did again. A show designed to push to its limits the technology of the day, with errors priced into the format, was no place to attempt his first.
If it’s true that he wasn’t told there would be no autocue, when he was used to having one, that’s a remarkable failure on the part of the person who hired him. After all, it wasn’t as if there were a whole load of previous Goals Extra-type shows he could have checked out to see how it was done. And even today, there are some knowledgeable and very well-paid television sports presenters who start to struggle badly if their autocue suddenly fails.
Also, not all the errors on that first Goals Extra were down to Greaves. It wasn’t his fault if there were sound issues, or edits cutting off unexpectedly.
And when things did go wrong, he didn’t lose his temper, as Tony Wilson did on the notorious news bulletin that ended his Granada career. He tried to keep calm and carry on. Not very convincingly, but he did try.
Then again, Greaves was given three chances to get it right as Goals Extra’s presenter, and didn’t learn his lessons quickly enough. Three weeks is hardly a long time to be given a chance in any job, but it was enough for Paul Doherty to see that his show needed a presenter with a better all-round knowledge of football.
As it turned out, Goals Extra was the start of something, the first step into the world of immediate highlights, years before on-demand streaming and YouTube, before there was even proper digital editing. When Paul Doherty died in 2016, all the tributes to him cited Goals Extra as an example of his innovative approach to television. The show was mentioned in none of Greaves’ obituaries.
Maybe it’s for the best that the first Goals Extra never resurfaces in its entirety. If it did, would it live down to its reputation? Could it carry the weight of its legend? Or would I watch it through and think: Actually, bits of this are OK?
Well, this is where Tony Wilson comes back in. Wilson sometimes liked to blend fact with myth, especially when discussing his life with Factory Records. Telling the story of the label’s decline and fall in the book of the film 24 Hour Party People, Wilson borrows the the pay-off line at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
It’s a shame, in a way, that someone with his profile, and his reputation for pushing boundaries, never got involved with Goals Extra, a show that, in its time, was cutting edge, even when it fell over the edge.
Imagine if he had. Perhaps then, The Damned Utd wouldn’t be the only major book and film to feature a regional television sports programme as a key plot point.
Now there’s an idea. Granada Goals Extra the movie, anyone?
Mike Whalley 
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