Televised Football in the Regions, part one: London - how The Big Match changed football broadcasting.

When a new company won the franchise for commercial television at the weekend in London in 1968, one of their innovations would force the BBC to up their game.

In the first of another remastered series from the 200%, I take a look at how the broadcasting of footbal changed with the arrival of The Big Match in 1968.

With a plethora of television channels just a click of the remote control away, it can feel difficult to be able to remember a time when, in media terms, we didn’t get what we want, when we want it. Anybody over the age of forty, however, will readily be able to remember a time when there were three television channels on the United Kingdom, none of which began showing programmes until half past nine in the morning and all of which closed down for the day not long after midnight.

Football has mirrored the world of media in this respect. After a couple of flirtations in the early 1960s, there was no live club football shown in England apart from the FA Cup final and major European trophy finals until the end of 1983, a situation that largely came about because of the intransigence of football clubs, who were terrified of the effects that televising matches might have on attendance figures, and in turn the governing bodies that represented them.

As such, genuine innovations in terms of football broadcasting were few and far between. There was, however, one programme that broke the mode, coming to be seen with the benefit of hindsight as the predecessor of televised football coverage as we know it today. That programme was The Big Match.