Andrew Palmer (1959-2021)
I lost my friend Andrew Palmer in September 2021. He was an executive sports producer, a man whose presence, working for both ILC Sport and ADI, was vital for many of the West Ham United DVD programmes produced from 1999-2008. We also made video films together for Leeds United, Everton and Chelsea during that period, some that are still sold in the respective club shops to this day, but it was for his creative work at West Ham United that he will be remembered.
‘An unstoppable force against an immoveable object’ This was a pretty decent description of Andrew in his many professional battles with his beloved West Ham. If he wanted to do something and copyright or other hiccuppy issues got in the way of his vision, he would juggle, reconnoitre, make a few phone calls, reframe and even go right to the top to get a change of mind sent back down the line. He would have enjoyed the fact that when it was asked of the club whether we could use the crest on the order of service programme at his funeral, they said the application could take up to fourteen days. I suggested using the older – and arguably better – Upton Park club crest from when Andrew worked with the club, so in the end we used that. Of course if we’d had Andrew there, he’d have got it sorted in a couple of days. On the day we decided to use the old version, West Ham sent through confirmation that we could use the new one. I think that would have tickled Andrew.
Andrew (never ‘Andy’) was born on 1st July 1959 in Orpington, Kent, and was just a year younger than me. I met Andrew because of our mutual love and suffering from being long term West Ham United fans, so without the club we would not have met. We were from the same era – a club that produced three World Cup winners who (weirdly) won nothing more with West Ham after that fabulous day in 1966.
Andrew worked with fellow rights licensee Nigel Wood from 1990 when they were both involved with Italia ’90, and they formed the International Licensing Company (thats ILC to you and me) in 1996. They happened to secure the rights to a VHS video programme about the latest England teenage superstar, Michael Owen in 1998, the same year he finished equal top scorer in the Premier League with Chris Sutton and Dion Dublin in his first full season for Liverpool, and they sold many thousands of copies, establishing themselves with a financial ground base to grow their film, music and now football operation, entitled ILC Sport. His mission statement for the company was Taking Sport Seriously, something he always did.
I first met Andrew at the offices of ADI in Preston. He was the director of ILC Sport. I was the match commentator for West Ham and had already started to produce their football DVDs for ADI, so a meet with Andrew who would be marketing all the football product, was always going to happen. We were the two Londoners, met in the North West with equal measures of suspicion and cynicism. Two of the editors at Preston asked me, each separately, just who the scary gangland London bloke in the leather jacket was. Andrew spoke in a low voice and rarely smiled when he was at meetings in Preston. He told me he always behaved that way at ADI because he was a little nervous and wanted to see what they had to offer before he got involved with them. Because of this enigmatic low profile delivery the younger staff there became terrified of him. Hilarious, because anyone who got to know Andrew knew what a generous and loveable man he was.
Nigel and Andrew set themselves up in an office in Marylebone, and that was where I first spent time with Andrew in London. I usually left the ILC offices with bags of product, music and football DVDs. Andrew drove a metallic blue Mercedes, number plate WHU 5. Needless to say I was majorly impressed, perhaps more so by the plate than the car.
Andrew himself was romantically impressed by one of the women working in media distribution he had come into contact with over the years. He told me about her and wondered what I thought about it all. You’re my age, I told him. Don’t hang around. He didn’t, and Andrew and Liz were married on 16th June 2001. What I loved most about Liz when I met her was that she called him ‘Palmer’. You can’t buy that kind of irreverence. The editors at ADI might have seen him as Harry Palmer, whereas I saw him more as Geoffrey Palmer. But I loved the bloke – he always gave good copy too, and had good ideas. A natural for the business.
Thanks to Andrew I got to stay at the ex- Ceaușescu hotel in Romania with the West Ham team when we covered their European game against Steaua Bucharest and I travelled with him to Spain for a few days interviewing and making a programme about Julian Dicks. Andrew also came up with the idea for a programme about Paolo Di Canio, challenging me to turn the five minute interview we’d been promised with him after training into a DVD programme. I cornered Di Canio and we flattered the poor man almost unconscious with our idolising behaviour, keeping him there for an hour and a half, and eventually turning the interview into two DVDs that still sell in West Ham shops, twenty years on. We also flew out with the West Ham team for a pre-season friendly against Celtic, where Di Canio was also idolised, and he scored for West Ham in a 2-1 defeat. We made a piece for the 1999-2000 video that featured an interview with Harry Redknapp and Martin O’Neill, then managing Celtic. This inside story made on a whim was the kind of thing Andrew invariably persuaded the club to get involved with.
Nigel and Andrew left Marylebone at the end of 2003 and went to work from Pinewood Studios. Then Nigel died suddenly and unexpectedly and ADI binned off ILC Sport, so Andrew had to rebuild and downsize, but he did it without self-pity or recriminations. I never found him bitter or reproachful, whilst he had more than enough reason to feel hard done by. Liz would have been vital and inspiring to build that on, but these were hard times, and when Andrew’s problems with his heart required a replacement operation, it looked like fate was wrestling something out of my friend. He battled back. I saw him in hospital and he came back from being as ill as I’d ever seen anyone, to look both dapper and recovered at his sixtieth in Leek back in late June 2019.
You would never have known what he had gone through and it was great to see him at the top of his game again. Somehow all the more tragic then for him to have been struck down by the pandemic after having beaten virtually everything life had thrown at him in the last fifteen years.
My final thoughts return to West Ham United where it all started for both of us. Andrew left us on 1st September 2021, around the same time as West Ham United found themselves top of the Premier League and the team that were propping all the others up in bottom position were their North London neighbours, Arsenal. Favourite league positions forever and a classy moment to depart this earth, you have to admit.
Andrew Palmer, executive director of ILC Sport from 2001-2009, and lifelong West Ham United fan, now cheering us on from his permanent season ticket seat in the sky.
