Jeff Stelling puts his success down to hard work and luck

Earlier this year he added a lucrative sideline as presenter of Countdown, but although Stelling puts his success down to luck, and the effortless style to hard work, the industry knows his value. Tellingly, the man who gave us the deathless line “They’ll be dancing in the streets of Total Network Solutions tonight” has monopolised the Sports Journalists Association’s broadcaster of the year award.

He admits that he never expected the show to enjoy its present status. “When you describe it as it is, you’d think ‘that can’t possibly work,’ but it does work and it has for eleven years,” he said. “When I took the job I thought it had a pretty limited lifespan, but there was obviously a gap there and we drove right into the middle of it. It is effectively a football results service, which it was originally, but it bloomed from there.

“It is conversational and, we hope, humorous, not to mention a place to find out your team’s score and hear people talking about it. Before that there was Teletext, which takes ages to change pages, or radio 5Live – but when I was working there, they would leave the scores to go to the commentary game, which I thought was a big mistake because it was irrelevant to so many people.”

Much of the programme’s appeal is the relaxed banter that terrestrial broadcasters struggle to match. It starts as soon as Phil Thompson, Paul Merson and the others arrive in the office, and continues even during the commercial breaks as the lukewarm curry soup arrives on set. The panellists are all former top-class players, but Stelling is the man who pulls it all together, and part of his appeal is that, as a supporter of a lower-division club, he has a perspective on the wider football world that followers of the big four might lack.

“I think so,” he said. “We take in the whole spectrum of football supporters, whereas nowhere else really does. It makes life easier because people can’t really accuse me – although they still do – of being biased towards Arsenal or Chelsea or Liverpool. They all know that my team is Hartlepool, so it helps, although in the early days I was told to stop mentioning Hartlepool quite so much.

“When you watch football at that level, you are aware of the terrace humour that has always been there at small grounds where the fans are close to the pitch – it can very acerbic, very cutting, and the players hear it – it’s part of the whole occasion. So I’ve always associated football with that banter, and you sometimes don’t get that at the Premier League grounds. I’m not saying it’s exclusively a lower league thing, because it’s not, but it’s a different view of the game.”

It is the (cleaned-up) terrace humour that makes the show what it is, and uniquely British – up to a point. “I hear there’s an Italian version with dancing girls,” Stelling said. “I was thinking that is a development we could take on board! Football is an industry and people’s livelihoods depend on it, and we know that. As far as football matters go, it might ruin their weekend, but that’s all it’ll do – so we feel we can have a bit of fun at someone’s expense. At Stockport County and Southampton, the gateman and the dinner lady might lose their jobs, but that’s off the field. Teams go up, teams go down and it’s upsetting, but it’s not life or death.”

YouTube abounds with clips from the show that include the singing James Brown doll that Stelling produced whenever the Hartlepool player of the same name scored, and a rant delivered by Stelling, egged on by the guests, against those who had voted Middlesbrough the worst place to live in the UK. Although the best moments are the unrehearsed and spontaneous reactions to events on the invisible screens – or in the case of roving reporter Chris Kamara, going on behind his back – Stelling had some of his most memorable cracks set up well in advance: such as “Jelleyman’s thrown a wobbly” when Gareth Jelleyman saw a red card, which is also the title of Stelling’s new book about the show.

“I remember seeing that he’d scored a couple of goals, and I thought that would be a decent line, but he’d never been sent off, and lo and behold, it finally happened in the last minute of a game, when there a million other scores coming in. I thought: ‘Sod it, I’m still going to use it, never mind that Manchester United have scored against Arsenal.’ Then a couple of weeks later he was sent off again, so of course I shamelessly used it once more. He’s just gone from Rushden to Barrow on loan.”

That encyclopaedic knowledge is Stelling’s trademark, as he effortlessly dredges up a fact from the memory banks - or, in reality, scrawled pages of hand-written, highlighted notes that he usually puts together at Winchester Services on the M3. “I don’t know if it looks effortless, but loads of kids and university students write in and ask about it but I always tell them that the key is not what happens on Saturday afternoon but the work you put in on a Thursday and a Friday. If you prepare you’ve got half a chance.

“I used to work on horse racing on BBC radio with Peter Bromley, and the preparation he put into his racecards was incredible, so meticulous. That helped me appreciate how much hard work paid off. I’ve got lucky, and that’s the end of the story, but I like to think that I made the most of my luck.”

Who watches? “It’s amazing,” he said. “Students, people who are away from home, wives whose husbands are at a match and want to know what sort of mood he’s going to come back in, people who love the way Tony Cottee dresses. There are even people who have e-mailed to say they would rather watch Soccer Saturday than go to a live game. I’m not sure what Sky had in mind, but they can’t have imagined this.

“I remember seeing Brian Barwick who was chief executive at ITV when they tried The Goal Rush, and he complained that when he walked down high streets and went to football grounds it was always our programme that was on in the windows and never theirs. He realised eventually that it wasn’t worth trying.”

ITV actually attempted to lure him from Sky to front live coverage, including the World Cup, but he decided that he would turn down their lucrative offer to stay with Soccer Saturday. Surely he could never imagine handing it over to a different presenter? “I think I’ve only ever missed it once on a Saturday. It’s part of the week, in fact, it’s the highlight of the week. People ask what I did before this. I started at the bottom, the council house boy who got lucky. I sometimes sit next to these people and think ‘How can it be that I am here?’”

In fact, he began at Radio Tees and worked his way up via LBC, Radio 2 and TV-AM, and has covered or presented everything from American football to sumo. After making sure that it would not clash with his Sky work, Stelling agreed to become the new host of Countdown, and even that has taken on a surreal edge with dictionary corner guests including Jerry Springer, although repartee with the contestants is harder to develop than in now-established comedic partnerships with Merson, Thompson and Kamara. Although, like Soccer Saturday, it has a cult following, Countdown is unlikely to spawn anything resembling the Soccer Saturday drinking game that requires certain amounts of alcohol to be imbibed whenever key events occur on the show.

Stelling has now written a book that reads like an episode of Soccer Saturday in print form. “The idea it that it takes you through the chaos from start to finish, although anyone who has ever watched it knows already what Merse is like and that Thommo could start an argument in a phone box and that [Matt] Le Tiss[ier] will come shambling in looking like a complete wreck.”

The title wrote itself, and the publishers no doubt hope for a hit on the scale of the programme that inspired it. If it tops the best sellers’ charts, they’ll be dancing in the streets of Hartlepool as well as Total Network Solutions.

Jelleyman’s Thrown A Wobbly
by Jeff Stelling
Harper Sport, £15.99