Ian St John

[Baltar]

Not just a great player but genuinely excellent in front of the camera. Very good to watch and listen to his thoughts on football matches, miles better than the boring pundits we have today.

[Sugar Ape]

Jim Rosenthal: When Ian St John laughed, everybody laughed

 

 

Ian St John, the legendary Liverpool, Motherwell and Scotland forward, has died at the age of 82. Jim Rosenthal, who worked with St John during his successful second career as a TV broadcaster on the iconic Saint and Greavsie show, explains why he was adored on and off the pitch. 

 

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Ian St John was a passionate lover of the game and a passionate human being. Every opinion that he had was a very strong opinion, but if you had a different one, he always respected someone else’s view. He had an amazing twinkle and he had a fiercely competitive heart, but a warm heart. His laugh was one of those laughs that rippled around the room — when he laughed, everybody laughed. It was infectious.

 

As a footballer, he was synonymous with the revival, and the rise to the top, of Liverpool. I always remember what a competitor he was — fearless — with a terrific amount of ability. He was part of that Scotland team that beat the world champions England back in 1967, along with the other Scottish greats of that time like Denis Law and Jim Baxter. He was right up there. He was a player of the highest calibre who had a habit of producing when it really mattered on very big occasions.

 

 

In the aftermath of his playing career it was a time when the main choices were to try to stay in football or to do something more mundane like run a pub. He was at Portsmouth when they were having a dreadful time, and he managed a bit at Motherwell. Great players don’t always make great managers. In fact, more often than not, they don’t. So he was a bit of a trailblazer in that he went into a media career. Now of course every footballer that stops playing wants to go into the media. Where it was a trickle and a very narrow alley before, it’s now a motorway of ex-footballers that are desperate to get into the media.

 

But the path for Ian St John turned out to be a magical and very important one. The way Saint and Greavsie came about was John Bromley, the iconic head of ITV sport, had the idea to put these two separate entities together in the studio for the Saturday lunchtime show so it really was an inspired piece of team selection by him that paid off for a good 10 years.

 

TV partnerships are very interesting in that you can’t create them. They either work or they don’t and this one, from the word go, clicked. You had the Scot and the Englishman, which was a good starting point for any debate. On screen every Saturday lunchtime for a large number of years, everybody could feel the chemistry there and feel how right it was.

 

The way they approached football punditry on television was pioneering. I’m BBC trained with a lot of the values of the BBC, but it was very straight. What Saint and Greavsie brought to football in bucketloads was humour. And not unkind humour either. It was very gently delivered humour surrounded actually by some quite good journalistic material. So it wasn’t all knockabout stuff. Saint and Greavsie of course had that respect from people on the back of their footballing careers. That ticked the broadcasters’ box but the charisma on top made it special.

 

It completely changed the landscape, to be funny in that environment. As a father of a comedian, I know that being funny is one of the hardest things in the world to do successfully.

 

It gave you football with a smile, which had been lacking, really. If I’m honest with you it’s lacking a bit today as well. It showed that football is an entertainment as well as a sport. Of course, it has a very big serious side. But everybody loves to laugh, and the two of them could laugh at themselves as well, which was another huge ingredient of the show.

 

I was the butt of every report I did. I knew I would probably get a whack when it went out on air. But it was delivered with charm, with no malice. And I think that sums up Saint and Jimmy and the show as well.

 

 

Today there is a lot more bile and bitterness and plain nastiness around the game, really. Not to say in those days it wasn’t a brutal environment, of course it was, but these days everyone just seems to be so much angrier about everyone — about other teams and players. It seemed a gentler environment all round. I am thankful for that.

 

There’s an iconic programme when Jimmy one time was ill, and Peter Brackley impersonated Jimmy Greaves’s voice with the spitting image puppet on screen. Ian had to play the straight man doing that. That is one of my all-time favourite episodes of the Saint and Greavsie show. Poor Jimmy wasn’t there. But it was brilliant. In the middle of that you look at Ian and go, “Hey, you’re a heck of a broadcaster. You’re a heck of a professional.”
 

 

He was generous with it. If you were working on a programme with him, you always looked forward to it because you knew he was a team player and he would do his best to help you. He wasn’t one of those who was all “me, me, I, I”. He always had that thought about other people and people that worked off-screen, behind the scenes, as well.

 

Of the two of them, he was probably more of the TV pro that had to hold the show together, Jimmy was a bit of the maverick. He would come in on the Saturday morning, then the light would go on and he would perform and produce. Of course they’re different characters, but for that reason, the jigsaw just fitted perfectly. That partnership was so perfect.

 

We all felt we were part of something special on the show. That came across by the audience reaction. Every show, every broadcaster, I think has its chapter and the 80s belonged to the Saint and Greavsie. When you look back now — obviously before the boom of satellite and numerous stations — they had the stage pretty much to themselves.

 

There were two big actors at the time, one was the BBC and one was ITV, and because we shaped the show the way it became, it was a unique show at that time. Could it be replicated today? Very, very difficult, because the broadcasting cake has now been sliced into so many little pieces.

 

It was television magic, it was television gold, even towards the later years when that sort of punditry started to go out of favour. But the two of them maintained their standards right to the end. The last show, they finished it by going off singing together, “This could be the last time” and that was a lovely TV moment that summed them up really, laughing until the end.

 

 

His passing has affected so many different people. But what a life, what a fantastic, varied life he had. When his name comes up, people will smile.

[halewood pete]

[halewood pete]

[Bjornebye]

RIP Saint

 

 

 

 

[Kevin D]