THERE are disappointing big-name withdrawals ahead of almost any golf tournament, but with Peter Alliss guaranteed to turn up, the loss of Gary Lineker at Wentworth next week is a huge blow. The BBC’s newly promoted face of golf will be out of the picture during the live coverage and is being “saved” for the Ryder Cup highlights packages later in the month.
No disrespect to Hazel Irvine — a presenter of great tact, tone and reliability for whom Wentworth should play well — but these days Lineker v Alliss is the clash that puts bums on sofas. Ahead of any golf presentation on the BBC, the question on everyone’s lips is whether this is the tournament in which we shall see signs of a workable peace. Or will this be the occasion when the antipathy between the two finally blows up big-time and terminates in a scene of gigantic unpleasantness involving the inappropriate use of a sand wedge?
It was Alliss what started it. Apparently piqued by the arrival on his patch of a star presenter (and from the vulgar world of football at that), the BBC’s veteran golf commentator used the pages of Golf International magazine to issue a crisp dismissal of Lineker’s competence — a dismissal all the more pointed for taking the guise of a compliment. Viewers, Alliss pointed out, would most likely have scored Lineker’s somewhat uncertain debut presentation of the Masters a three out of ten. Alliss himself, however, knowing how nervous Lineker was, gave him a seven.
There followed an Open Championship at Hoylake marked by icy hand-overs, thin smiles and brittle banter, with the two sitting just a couple of club lengths apart in the BBC’s studio and yet never for a moment implying that an album of duets was imminent.
Of course, Alliss, perhaps the only sports commentator ever to form a sentence entirely from noises (“Ey-up, oo-oo-oo, ah!”), is perfectly capable of dividing people all by himself. There are those who hold him in vast and unshakeable esteem as a sage and a wit and one of the few surviving members of a generation of silver-tongued broadcasting legends who could, without hyperbole, be regarded as the voices of their sports.
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On the other side is the anti-Alliss faction, who see him as the embodiment of snug-bar Britain at its most complacent and as a speaker of undiluted twaddle, who, with his frequent on-air greetings to post-operative golfing chums, has narrowed to an unnatural degree the gap between national sports broadcasting and hospital radio.
These tend to be the same people who leap gleefully on the Voice of Golf’s famous (and rare) confusion at the end of the 2004 Masters as evidence that last orders sounded on this estimable career some while ago and that we are well into drinking-up time.
A sustained and well-managed campaign against Lineker could, at the very least, help Alliss win over a few of the doubters. Next weekend, however, the conflict is suspended, and we’ll just have to watch the golf. Tip for Hazel, though: if it kicks off, watch out for his compliments. They’re lethal.
VIEWING GUIDE
The first two days will be shown on BBC Two, with the semi-final on September 16 on Saturday Grandstand, BBC One, from 1.05pm, and the final on Sunday Grandstand, BBC Two, from noon.