NoTV: BBC Radio Sez Get Your Own Bloody Betting Results

[Mark Jeffries]

One of the eccentricities of British broadcasting is the "classified football results," that Saturday afternoon at 5:05 tradition where a deep-voiced announcer reads very slowly the final soccer scores for the day in alphabetical order of home team by league, starting with the Premier League, presumably the order that they appear on the coupons issued by bookmakers to make bets on the outcomes.  Since 1948 BBC Radio listeners have heard the classified results on the generically-titled "Sports Report," the longest-running regularly-scheduled sports program in the world, with the same marching band theme song since day 1. (There's a scene in the current film "Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris" where the title character and her friend are listening intently to the classifieds while checking their cards.)  Since 1990, they've been heard on the Beeb's news-talk-sports Radio Five Live (and I know that from 1990 to 1994, it was the sports-"yoof" Radio 5, with a nighttime jock named Craig Ferguson--yes, that one) and since 2003 the deep-voiced announcer has been a woman--Charlotte Green.

However, last weekend with the beginning of the EPL season "Sports Report" said that they were dropping the classifieds to allow more time for match analysis and that the results were available on the BBC website and on the TV show "Final Score," which has been on since 1958 (some of that time as a segment on the Beeb's long-running but now-defunct sports anthology "Grandstand").  Leave it to Rupert Murdoch's people at the radio station talkSPORT (sister station to talkRADIO and talkTV, where Piers Morgan is getting beaten in the ratings every night by QVC) to remind people that they are still airing the classifieds, with an ad with the headline "TALKSPORT 1, BBC 0":

https://radiotoday.co.uk/2022/08/talksport-and-lbc-news-react-to-bbc-dropping-classified-results/?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Seven+days+in+radio+with+Wisebuddah+for+%28name%2Cfallback%3Dthis+week%21%29&utm_campaign=20220808_m168904647_Seven+days+in+radio__&utm_term=Read+More

Also, Global's LBC News, an all-news station that airs in London on the AM frequency to the sister news-talk station on FM and digital and online elsewhere in the UK, has started airing the classifieds at 5:05 p.m. on Saturday.