ABSTRACT
By all accounts it’s been running for donkeys’ years and the old story lines still get dragged up from time to time – Munich and the ‘Busby Babes’, ‘Pickles’ and the World Cup, ‘The Hand of God’, ‘Harry the Dog’ and Hillsborough are some of the all-time favourites. I don’t remember my first episode exactly. I think it must have been screened on ITV in those days and was called The Big Match or something, but I always liked to go down to one of the sets back then, where you could see the actors for real. It was probably Big Mal that got me hooked. Seeing him strut around Selhurst Park with his gangster’s fedora, fur coat, cigar and cheeky grin only whetted the appetite. You couldn’t get enough. Thankfully he seemed to be appearing in every episode at the time as he mouthed off cockily to the cameras, whilst the News of the World splashed pictures of him in the bath with the Palace players and porn queen Fiona Richmond all over their front page. Then came Venables and his ‘Team of the Eighties’ before Terry moved on and was eventually recast as El Tel in a Spanish spin off series called Barcelona.
