“I would say they were the six of the happiest years of my working life.” The velvet voice is just as I remember it. Chris Rea may have spent the majority of his 82 years living in England, but the warmth of his Dundonian accent still resonates as it did four decades earlier when he was a regular fixture for rugby supporters – including me – across the country as presenter ofBBC’sRugby Specialprogramme.
They were the best of times. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, rugby union was edging slowly but inexorably towards professionalism but the players were still amateurs with rich life stories to tell. The programme captured those with intimacy and colour, while providing highlights of the best of the club game and the international stage and offered a platform to debate major talking points.
Even now, hearing the first few bars of the show’s theme tune (quiz night answer, it wasHoly Mackerelby the Shadows’ drummer, Brian Bennett) evokes memories of mud-soaked Sunday afternoons on the unmissable highlights show on BBC Two.
Rea, the former Headingley, Scotland andBritish and Irish Lionscentre, was at the heart of it, presenting the show in its heyday years between 1988 and 1994. He remembers it all like it was yesterday.
“We were opposite theAntiques Roadshow[on BBC One] and followedSki Sunday,” Rea recalls, with a chuckle, from his home in a village near Newmarket. “It was a wonderful time. I am so chuffed you remember it because it’s very tempting to believe that none of the current generation of players think that rugby existed before 1995. It was great fun. In our day, the game was for the players... Now, of course, the game is about entertainment.”
Rea had found great joy himself as a player, winning 13 caps forScotland. He scored a try (which features on the classic video101 Best Tries) in what is regarded as one of the greatest games ever played in the old Five Nations: Wales’ 19-18 victory at Murrayfield played in front of an estimated crowd of 90,000.
In the final round of the championship, he famously scored the last-gasp winning try in the 16-15 victory against England at Twickenham, their first in 33 years. Just a week later he starred in another victory over England, this time at Murrayfield in the centenary match to mark the first match between the two sides, at Raeburn in 1871.
Later that year Rea, whose middle names are “William Wallace”, was selected for the Lions’ historic tour of New Zealand, making 10 appearances and scoring three tries against provincial sides, with the Test side clinching the series 2-1.
Lions’ tours in those days lasted four months, and when he returned Rea, who was then working for the BBC as an administrator in Leeds – where he had played for Headingley alongside the then England captain John Spencer and Sir Ian McGeechan – retired from the game.
He was posted to London and offered a six-month attachment to the BBC Radio sports department. The six months lasted nine years. Seeking new challenges in the media, Rea was appointed rugby and golf correspondent ofThe Scotsmanin Edinburgh but Johnnie Watherston, brother of former Scotland flanker Rory, was appointed to head up the BBC’s director and producer of rugby programmes, approached him to start doing some interviews forRugby Special,he had no hesitation in accepting. It would prove a life-changing moment, but one that ultimately ended in difficult circumstances.
“At the time, Nigel Starmer-Smith was having to do everything – he was interviewing people, he was doing the presentation from places like the ladies’ toilet at Orrell, and it was all done on a Saturday night. At the timeRugby Specialwas probably the graveyard shift, if you were working on it, you probably knew you were not going to become the BBC’s director general.
“Then Johnnie Watherston was appointed and he asked me if I would do a few interviews. One thing led to another and he asked if I would think of presenting the programme. I told him nothing would give me greater pleasure but that I won’t be doing it on a freezing Saturday night outside the clubhouse at Orrell or Harlequins or wherever, and stitching things together. Johnnie did a tremendous job persuading Jonathan Martin, who was the head of sport, that if we were going to build this programme up, it had to be studio-based, with guests, news from overseas and it had to be presented the following day.
“We had a fantastic producer called Sue Roberts who came up with brilliant ideas and features, and the programme was transformed from something pretty basic, and the audience figures started to go up and up and up.”
Rea recalls taking a call from the late Malcolm Pearce, the former newspaper wholesaler and farmer who was the benefactor that helped establish the great Bath side of the 1980s and 1990s.
“Malcolm was the start of the great Bath sides and would give players like Mike Catt and Gareth Chilcott genuine jobs and built up the team,” Rea added. “He phoned me up one day and said ‘Chris, I have got a young lad here who is definitely going to go to rugby league because he is a bricklayer at the moment. But we would love to keep him at Bath and wondered if you might be able to do something on him. His name is Jeremy Guscott.’
“I asked what his interests were and Malcolm said he was a very good-looking guy and he loved clothes. I took it to Johnnie, and he came up with the idea of bringing in the people who producedThe Clothes Showand giving Guscott a big make-over. It was hilarious. Malcolm had said that Guscott was “very shy” – how things change – so he decided to get Chilcott, who was most definitely not shy, to drive him up, and be his minder. It was like something out of the showStars in Your Eyeswhen the guests would say ‘Tonight Matthew, I am going to be…’ Guscott went off and came back a changed man, preening in this gorgeous outfit. It was one of the funniest and most successful programmes.
Advertisement
“Another memorable feature took us to St Andrew’s University to do a feature with Damian Hopley, who was studying there, and Neil Back, who was an incredible athlete. Back had been told at the time that he was too small for top international honours, but his argument that extra weight would adversely affect his speed and ball-playing skills, which he expressed forcefully on the programme, won the day. They were great days.
“The days when the game was for the players, not the spectators. When Jonathan Webb, the England full-back, who had a shocker against France at Twickenham, was given a hero’s ovation at Cardiff the next week after it was revealed that he had been performing a surgical operation and had not slept for 36 hours before the French game. The players were amateurs and it was accepted that theyhad other things that occupied their lives.”
TheRugby Specialaudiences soared. When Cornwall defeated Yorkshire in the county championship in 1991, Rea says the audience forRugby Specialthe following day hit two million viewers – from a low-point of 200,000 before the overhaul – and when England beat New Zealand at Twickenham in 1993, it reached 2.2 million.
Yet by far the greatest achievement of all is the fact that for a full year of broadcasting, Rea was secretly undergoing cancer treatment having been diagnosed with bowel, liver and lymph node cancer, having been told in 1993 that he only had a five per cent survival chance within the next five years if the surgery was not successful.
“Thirty-three years ago, that was a death sentence,” he recalls. “I am only here because of a specialist bowel colorectal surgeon called Alan Wells. I underwent surgery in the Fitzwilliam Hospital in Peterborough. I had to go privately to get a certain type of chemotherapy treatment that had just come from the US and was successfully trialled there.”
Instead of a short course of chemo, his treatment lasted 52 weeks. “I said I would do it if I could keep going with the programme,” he added. “They said I wouldn’t lose what hair I had left but would put on weight. We came to an agreement that if there was any change to my physical state, then I would be the first to say, ‘this is not on.’ You can’t have someone looking like death warmed up presenting a sports programme.
“I felt dreadful every Monday and for a couple days after but by the end of the week I was okay. I put weight on because of the effect of the steroids, but nobody would have known, and that was a source of great pride.”
His treatment was ongoing when he travelled to New Zealand in 1993 for the Lions tour, which back then involved covering 13 matches over three months.
“I went off with a suitcase full of drugs and I remember thinking, ‘How am I going to work this?’ The staff at the Fitzwilliam told me that whatever town I arrived in, I had to contact the nearest hospital. I remember my first one, sitting in a pretty basic waiting room and being greeted by a trainee nurse. At the Fitzwilliam, I was treated as a star patient because no-one had ever been through the 52-week treatment. Apparently they had been using the treatment for years in New Zealand. I was staggered.”
Earlier that year Bobby Moore died of a similar condition, and even now Rea thinks about how lucky he was to survive. “I remember thinking I should have been more grateful to the Almighty, but I had an 11-year-old daughter and a family to look after, so I had to keep working.”
The elation of going into remission, however, was later replaced with the acute disappointment when he was told the following year that the production ofRugby Specialwas going to be outsourced to an independent company and that his services would no longer be required.
“I was devastated. Johnnie lost his job too. I hadn’t sought any additional support from the BBC during my illness. It was a real blow for me. I was sorry thatRugby Specialdid go downhill a bit and they took it a different way. That’s fine, you always get to the end of a success story and things need changing, but I think it was the BBC that lost interest in rugby more than anything else. It was also a result and a consequence of professionalism.”
After losing his presenting job with the BBC, he was part of ITV’s commentary team at the 1995 World Cup in South Africa, which he ranks along with England’s victory in 2003 as the two best tournaments. As rugby correspondent forThe Independent on Sunday, he also was not afraid to make a stand in the early days of professionalism, putting him at odds with the club owners by advocating former RFU chairman Chris Brittle’s unsuccessful vision for the top players in England to be offered central contracts by the RFU. He feels England are still paying the price now.
“I think that despite the fantastic resources in playing numbers and funding, I would very much doubt if England would have one player in a composite Six Nations side this season and that is terrible, really,” added Rea, who went on to work for the International Rugby Board [now World Rugby] as it head of communications.
“I say that not because I am a Scot, far from it because I have spent most of my life down here and enjoyed England’s three great sides – Billy Beaumont’s, Will Carling’s and the 2003 World Cup side. At the time Fran Cotton and Clive Woodward were fully supportive of the Brittle plan because they realised that going down the club route was always going to be a problem.
“The idea was that the clubs would retain their identity and support, but that the top players would be to the RFU and the primacy of the international game was paramount. In my view that hasn’t changed. Every time England take the field, they should be favourites, like New Zealand. They should have an aura about them. I think it is vital for the world game that England – and I say this as a Scot – are always up there. Just getting to finals is not enough. The 2003 final was compelling. It was wonderful but they have never really regained that aura of invincibility.”
