Growing up with the Boro in an Analogue Age. (Part Two)
This is the second and final part of Spikelangelo's exploration of the joys and wonders of the pre-internet football fan age. The author, Rob Barron (Spikelangelo) - in the first part the author left his THEN girlfriend and the readers hanging as he spent several hours wandering around Italy looking for news of the Boro score. Well, we were away at Man United! In this final point he jeopardises his marriage when racking up a phone bill of humongous proportions dialling Boro club call!!
Even as late as the late Eighties, the internet only existed in Tim Berners-Lee’s imagination, and Fleet street ruled. But a grass roots challenge began, that for the first time that I could remember, gave ordinary fans a voice.
Up until that point, football had been a brutal, tribal affair, determinedly working class, and football fans were looked on as a “problem” of society. So much so that Thatcher had football in her sights for reform. But counter to this, fuelled by The Summer of Love, it began to change. The wit of the terraces embraced the weird phenomenon of inflatables, where the Kop ends of grounds all over the country, rang to the cries of, “Put that bloody Banana down, I can’t see a thing,” as fans strove mightily to outdo themselves for the most bizarre inflatable to represent their club. So, Man City had bananas, inspired, apparently by Imre Varadi. I can’t remember whether Boro ever had a signature inflatable, or whether that particular craze was just too daft for the Bovril and Newboulds brigade. At the same time, the fanzine was born. All over the country, dedicated fans were writing and producing their own club magazine in a huge cultural renaissance. FMTTM was one of the originals, and sadly one of the few surviving fanzines. (sad not that it survives, but that the others don’t!)
In a sense, the fanzine movement picked up the baton from the punk fanzine explosion of the previous decade, where xeroxed publications like “Sniffin’ Glue” challenged the dominance of NME , Sounds and Melody Maker. The football versions were similarly vibrant, authentic, scruffy and amateurish, with some great writing.
Living in London in the late Eighties, a monthly trip to Sports Pages in Charing Cross road was obligatory, and proof, flicking through an entire roomful of fanzines, that the grass roots love of the game was strong and spreading. For exiles like myself, FMTTM and Middlesbrough Supporters South magazine, were an invaluable source of information about Boro, when the mainstream media barely recognised the existence of any club outside the big 5. But it was more than that. It was an affirmation of one’s roots and the sense of being part of a shared cultural community, a reminder of where you came from and what it meant.
Even the Evening Gazette played its part, as, for a couple of years in the early nineties, my Wife got me a subscription to the Monday edition of the Gazette as part of a birthday present. It came midweek, rolled up tight like a cylinder, and it was a real treat to delve into the match reports from Eric Paylor. Alright, he wasn’t Cliff Mitchell, but even legends, have to retire at some point. And in the ongoing Boro news desert that was London and The South East in the nineties, it was journalistic gold. So bad was the Boro news situation, that for about twenty -five years, I forced myself to buy redtop tabloids, particularly in the Summer, purely for transfer gossip. Even in this era of fake news, conspiracy theories and mindless social media influencers, this alone has meant that the invention of the internet has improved the quality of my life.
Finally, just a quick mention of two other sources of information that were invaluable in the Analogue Age, and that have both gone the way of the teasmaid, Betamax and the overhead projector: Ceefax and Boro Club Call. These provided a vital lifeline for the Boro fan in the late eighties/ early nineties , much as flint did for Stone Age man. Ceefax, for the young uns out there, was a steam-powered data system that was broadcast on your terrestrial TV set. The text resembled a graphic of lego pieces, and it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that inside the telly, just like in the Numbskulls in the Beano, there was an army of midget creatures manually rolling the letters into position. It was that cumbersome and unwieldy. But Boro had a page of their own, so dedicated news was suddenly available 24/7. I think it was via Ceefax that I first got wind of the possibility that Boro had signed Juninho. What a red-letter day that was! There was also the permanent link to the club call numbers that also provided dedicated news, so the one fed the other, and many happy and expensive hours were spent idling between the two news sources.
When you really did the analysis, though, the “news” these sources carried was pitifully thin. Half-baked rumours imaginatively trailed to make you think that Boro were on the verge of signing yet another international superstar. Club Call were particularly cunning. They would blaze a “scoop” headline on the Ceefax page, refer to it as “coming right up” when you rang the number, only for a 30 second bit of fluff that mentioned the player at the end of the call, without anything describing a firm decision, after you had spent a small fortune on a premium rate number for ten minutes.
And before you think, “nobody would be that stupid,” well, I am that person who proves stupidity is only too common amongst football fans desperate for news. At one time in this coverage desert, during Lennie Lawrence’s brief stay at Boro as a First Division club, in 1992, there was a protracted transfer saga involving Rob Lee, then of Charlton. It’s been well-documented that Kevin Keegan persuaded Lee to sign for Newcastle instead of Boro, telling him it was closer to London. What is less well known was that the whole sorry saga left me with a telephone bill of several thousand pounds.
The transfer was reaching a climax one Friday in September. It happened to be just as my wife and I were going away for the weekend to a cottage in Lyme Regis. There was a real possibility that Boro would seal the deal that day, so I just thought I’d sneak in another call to Club Call to check before setting off. Much to my disappointment, it was the usual old flannel, with a little hint that Newcastle had joined the race and looked as if they might scupper the understanding Lennie had with Charlton that Lee would come to us. I was hanging on the call for more news, jeopardising the romantic atmosphere of the weekend to come, as my wife frantically shouted for me to put the bloody phone down and get in the car. Hastily I did as I was told and piled in the car to drive to Dorset before the London rush hour took hold.
At some point in the next week, I got a call from BT challenging me about a phone bill for several thousands of pounds. Yes, of course, I had not replaced the receiver correctly and the recorded Boro bulletin had spooled away on an endless, hugely expensive loop over the whole weekend. My wife’s indulgence of my Boro obsession as an endearing part of Northern working-class charm was stretched to its limits, and a frosty atmosphere descended on the house. Luckily for me, my marriage and my future two children, peace was declared when my telephone negotiations with Club Call led to them cancelling the bill. This was not down to any Henry Kissinger-like skill at compromise, or forensic legalistic advocacy. They just felt sorry for me, and more particularly for my wife being married to such a bozo. I rewarded them with several years more of mindless devotion, before I and the rest of the world were released from the addiction to newspapers, fanzines, Ceefax pages and Club Call messages. The internet was born and everywhere, football fans were free. The only price to pay was Brexit, Boris Johnson and Trump, ushered in on a tsunami of fake news.
Was it worth it? Well, it’s selfish I know, but political incumbency is temporary, and the current crew of liars and charlatans are survivable. A life without the Mighty Reds on line, on the other hand, just doesn’t bear thinking about. END
Rob Barron's blog is www.growl.blog and is about culture, politics and education. Here are the links to buy the book Xero Tolerance. It's also available from Amazon and from Troubador on the links below:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zero-Toler...entKeywords=tolerance+the+old+grey+owl&sr=8-1
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/contemporary/zero-tolerance/
Even as late as the late Eighties, the internet only existed in Tim Berners-Lee’s imagination, and Fleet street ruled. But a grass roots challenge began, that for the first time that I could remember, gave ordinary fans a voice.
Up until that point, football had been a brutal, tribal affair, determinedly working class, and football fans were looked on as a “problem” of society. So much so that Thatcher had football in her sights for reform. But counter to this, fuelled by The Summer of Love, it began to change. The wit of the terraces embraced the weird phenomenon of inflatables, where the Kop ends of grounds all over the country, rang to the cries of, “Put that bloody Banana down, I can’t see a thing,” as fans strove mightily to outdo themselves for the most bizarre inflatable to represent their club. So, Man City had bananas, inspired, apparently by Imre Varadi. I can’t remember whether Boro ever had a signature inflatable, or whether that particular craze was just too daft for the Bovril and Newboulds brigade. At the same time, the fanzine was born. All over the country, dedicated fans were writing and producing their own club magazine in a huge cultural renaissance. FMTTM was one of the originals, and sadly one of the few surviving fanzines. (sad not that it survives, but that the others don’t!)
In a sense, the fanzine movement picked up the baton from the punk fanzine explosion of the previous decade, where xeroxed publications like “Sniffin’ Glue” challenged the dominance of NME , Sounds and Melody Maker. The football versions were similarly vibrant, authentic, scruffy and amateurish, with some great writing.
Living in London in the late Eighties, a monthly trip to Sports Pages in Charing Cross road was obligatory, and proof, flicking through an entire roomful of fanzines, that the grass roots love of the game was strong and spreading. For exiles like myself, FMTTM and Middlesbrough Supporters South magazine, were an invaluable source of information about Boro, when the mainstream media barely recognised the existence of any club outside the big 5. But it was more than that. It was an affirmation of one’s roots and the sense of being part of a shared cultural community, a reminder of where you came from and what it meant.
Even the Evening Gazette played its part, as, for a couple of years in the early nineties, my Wife got me a subscription to the Monday edition of the Gazette as part of a birthday present. It came midweek, rolled up tight like a cylinder, and it was a real treat to delve into the match reports from Eric Paylor. Alright, he wasn’t Cliff Mitchell, but even legends, have to retire at some point. And in the ongoing Boro news desert that was London and The South East in the nineties, it was journalistic gold. So bad was the Boro news situation, that for about twenty -five years, I forced myself to buy redtop tabloids, particularly in the Summer, purely for transfer gossip. Even in this era of fake news, conspiracy theories and mindless social media influencers, this alone has meant that the invention of the internet has improved the quality of my life.
Finally, just a quick mention of two other sources of information that were invaluable in the Analogue Age, and that have both gone the way of the teasmaid, Betamax and the overhead projector: Ceefax and Boro Club Call. These provided a vital lifeline for the Boro fan in the late eighties/ early nineties , much as flint did for Stone Age man. Ceefax, for the young uns out there, was a steam-powered data system that was broadcast on your terrestrial TV set. The text resembled a graphic of lego pieces, and it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that inside the telly, just like in the Numbskulls in the Beano, there was an army of midget creatures manually rolling the letters into position. It was that cumbersome and unwieldy. But Boro had a page of their own, so dedicated news was suddenly available 24/7. I think it was via Ceefax that I first got wind of the possibility that Boro had signed Juninho. What a red-letter day that was! There was also the permanent link to the club call numbers that also provided dedicated news, so the one fed the other, and many happy and expensive hours were spent idling between the two news sources.
When you really did the analysis, though, the “news” these sources carried was pitifully thin. Half-baked rumours imaginatively trailed to make you think that Boro were on the verge of signing yet another international superstar. Club Call were particularly cunning. They would blaze a “scoop” headline on the Ceefax page, refer to it as “coming right up” when you rang the number, only for a 30 second bit of fluff that mentioned the player at the end of the call, without anything describing a firm decision, after you had spent a small fortune on a premium rate number for ten minutes.
And before you think, “nobody would be that stupid,” well, I am that person who proves stupidity is only too common amongst football fans desperate for news. At one time in this coverage desert, during Lennie Lawrence’s brief stay at Boro as a First Division club, in 1992, there was a protracted transfer saga involving Rob Lee, then of Charlton. It’s been well-documented that Kevin Keegan persuaded Lee to sign for Newcastle instead of Boro, telling him it was closer to London. What is less well known was that the whole sorry saga left me with a telephone bill of several thousand pounds.
The transfer was reaching a climax one Friday in September. It happened to be just as my wife and I were going away for the weekend to a cottage in Lyme Regis. There was a real possibility that Boro would seal the deal that day, so I just thought I’d sneak in another call to Club Call to check before setting off. Much to my disappointment, it was the usual old flannel, with a little hint that Newcastle had joined the race and looked as if they might scupper the understanding Lennie had with Charlton that Lee would come to us. I was hanging on the call for more news, jeopardising the romantic atmosphere of the weekend to come, as my wife frantically shouted for me to put the bloody phone down and get in the car. Hastily I did as I was told and piled in the car to drive to Dorset before the London rush hour took hold.
At some point in the next week, I got a call from BT challenging me about a phone bill for several thousands of pounds. Yes, of course, I had not replaced the receiver correctly and the recorded Boro bulletin had spooled away on an endless, hugely expensive loop over the whole weekend. My wife’s indulgence of my Boro obsession as an endearing part of Northern working-class charm was stretched to its limits, and a frosty atmosphere descended on the house. Luckily for me, my marriage and my future two children, peace was declared when my telephone negotiations with Club Call led to them cancelling the bill. This was not down to any Henry Kissinger-like skill at compromise, or forensic legalistic advocacy. They just felt sorry for me, and more particularly for my wife being married to such a bozo. I rewarded them with several years more of mindless devotion, before I and the rest of the world were released from the addiction to newspapers, fanzines, Ceefax pages and Club Call messages. The internet was born and everywhere, football fans were free. The only price to pay was Brexit, Boris Johnson and Trump, ushered in on a tsunami of fake news.
Was it worth it? Well, it’s selfish I know, but political incumbency is temporary, and the current crew of liars and charlatans are survivable. A life without the Mighty Reds on line, on the other hand, just doesn’t bear thinking about. END
Rob Barron's blog is www.growl.blog and is about culture, politics and education. Here are the links to buy the book Xero Tolerance. It's also available from Amazon and from Troubador on the links below:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zero-Toler...entKeywords=tolerance+the+old+grey+owl&sr=8-1
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/contemporary/zero-tolerance/
