David Coleman(1926–2013)

David Robert Coleman was born at the small village of Alderley Edge in north-east Cheshire on 26 April 1926, only son of Frederick Coleman, a London Midland and Scottish Railway clerk at the Crewe goods yard, and Mary Williams. The household was the standard working-railway-family pattern of post-1918 north Cheshire: the father commuting to Crewe daily on the Stockport line, the family living in a two-up two-down terrace on Brook Lane, the boy schooled at the Manchester High School of Commerce in Stretford on a county scholarship to thirteen. He left school at sixteen in 1942 to work as a junior reporter on the Stockport Express, was called up at eighteen in 1944, served two years in the Royal Marines on the Mediterranean fleet at Trieste through 1945 and 1946, and came home in 1947 to take up his old reporter's post at the Stockport paper.

He was an athlete first. He won the Manchester Mile at the 1949 Manchester Boys' Open Athletics Championships in four minutes and twenty seconds, in front of a Saturday-evening crowd at the White City Manchester running track, on the day after he had filed a Stockport Express piece on the same meeting. The eight-club north-of-England athletics circuit of the late 1940s recognised him as a talented but not-quite-international-class middle-distance runner; he ran the British AAA half-mile at Stamford Bridge in 1950 (came fifth), broke his ankle in a training fall at Macclesfield in early 1951, and walked away from competitive running at twenty-four. He spent the rest of the decade as the sports editor of the Stockport Express, the Stockport correspondent for the *Daily Mirror* football desk, and a freelance horse-racing tipster for the Manchester Sporting Chronicle.

The BBC's Manchester regional office recruited him to the new BBC North television service in 1954 as the regional sports presenter. He moved to BBC Television Centre at Wood Lane, west London, in 1958 on the launch of *Grandstand*, the new four-and-a-half-hour Saturday-afternoon sports magazine programme that the BBC had been planning as the corporate response to ITV's threatened sports-coverage roll-out. He took the *Grandstand* anchor's chair for the first time on 11 October 1958 and held it for twenty seasons through to 1978, the longest single tenure of any *Grandstand* presenter. The format the programme worked on (live-cut between race meetings, football matches, athletics meetings, the Saturday-evening *Final Score* football-results sequence) was Coleman-Coleman-architected through the first decade and became the model of every subsequent Saturday-afternoon sports-magazine programme on British television.

He presented every Olympic Games between Rome 1960 and Sydney 2000 for the BBC: Rome, Tokyo, Mexico City, Munich, Montreal, Moscow, Los Angeles, Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney. The Munich Games of September 1972 produced the most-discussed broadcasting hour of his career. He was anchoring the BBC's live coverage of the Games at the BBC outside-broadcast booth at the Olympic Village on the morning of 5 September 1972 when the Palestinian Black September commando squad took the Israeli Olympic team hostage in their dormitory two hundred metres from the BBC booth. He stayed live on air for nineteen hours through the day and the night of the hostage crisis, reading the developments off the BBC outside-broadcast wire and from the stadium press-corps gossip he could see through the booth window, until the failed German police rescue at the Fürstenfeldbruck airfield at one in the morning of 6 September killed all nine remaining Israeli hostages and the five Palestinian operatives. The nineteen-hour live broadcast was the foundational event of his reputation as a live-television journalist as distinct from a sports presenter.

*A Question of Sport*, the BBC One Saturday-night sports quiz, gave him the chairmanship from 1979 to 1997 and the public's wider recognition. *Private Eye* began the *Colemanballs* column in March 1981, on a principle (devised by the *Private Eye* sports editor of the period) of collecting and printing the on-air slips of the tongue of sports commentators across the British networks. The column's title-fame quickly attached the entire genre to Coleman personally even though most of the entries were attributed to other commentators (Murray Walker, Bryon Butler, Brendan Foster among the recurring offenders). The *Colemanballs* compilations ran across nineteen editions through to 2009 and remain the standard British coffee-table comic-reference book of the genre. Coleman, on the public record, treated the column with humour and the private record was that he disliked it intensely. He was awarded the OBE in 1992, the Olympic Order in 1996, and the BAFTA Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. He died of cardiac failure at the small private hospital at Slough on 21 December 2013, eighty-seven years old. The Coleman name in its English-side catalogue is the medieval Anglo-Norse personal name compressed into a surname (Old Norse *kolmaðr*, the swarthy man); he carried it from an Alderley Edge railway-clerk's family into the foundation generation of post-war BBC sports broadcasting.