MISSING THE GREAT ESCAPE
Saturday 11th May 2003
As the West Ham 2002-03 season drew to a nail-biting close, it was clear that the club’s end of season video was going to be a thing of beauty, or a DVD (we were releasing it on both formats) to simply make up the numbers in the devoted fan’s WHU Library collection. I had been involved in producing the end of season programme for the club since 1998-99, and with Hammers in the bottom three of the Premier League, the company financing the product were becoming understandably nervous.
I had somehow managed to persuade my boss that the miracle was possible (I’ve been a fan since 1970), and that we should make preparations for a ‘Great Escape’ video that could prove one of our best-selling titles ever. In late April, with the club still looking odds-on for the drop, we hired Tony Cottee for a day and I wrote a script to accommodate both endings for the club that the season would potentially produce. Tony is of course West Ham royalty and a consummate professional, and was the perfect choice to ‘host’ such a show.
Glenn Roeder, the rookie manager, had taken Harry Redknapp’s side to the dizzy heights of seventh in his first season, but had followed it with a spectacularly disappointing ‘difficult second album’ year. Well-publicised fallouts with Paolo Di Canio and the promotion of the young Joe Cole to captain were two Roeder moments that changed the effectiveness of the side. The loss of striker Fredi Kanouté early in the season also hadn’t helped, not to mention the loss of expensive signing goalkeeper David James, before he’d even played a game for the Hammers.
Despite the creeping feeling of despair, our end of season programme already had a couple of exclusive moments in the can that we could include. I had persuaded the company to set up an extra camera at home games so we would be ready to interview anyone of interest who’d been at the game and raise the quality of a potential Great Escape video even further. Thankfully we were relying on one of the real stars behind the scenes at Upton Park, Sue Page, who dealt with that side of things, and she didn’t let us down.
After the 2-2 home draw with Aston Villa in April, Sue brought David Essex in to chat with us in the interview room. For the younger fans out there, Essex is a very successful English singer / songwriter. In the 1970s he had 19 Top 40 singles in the UK (including two number ones) and 16 Top 40 albums. He has also had an extensive career as an actor. Google him. Not only that, but he is a really devoted fan who has many connections with the club, as you’ll see. Essex. Geddit?
To start the interview I asked whether coming to Upton Park was still a regular activity for him.
“It is. It’s very nerve-wracking,” he replied. “I’ve been coming here since I was four, which is nearly 100 years ago. They’ve always been the same. West Ham are consistent in their inconsistency. It’s been a mysterious season really because against Arsenal at home they were superb. 2-1 up and about to take a penalty and then it all drifted away. Looking at the team today you wonder why. For the last eight games they’ve matched every team they’ve played, and the position they’re in… it’s a bit of a mystery really.
“I still feel positive. I think we’ll stay up. It’s an old thing – ‘we’re too good to go down’ – but we do still have to play Bolton Wanderers and Birmingham City and those matches will be pivotal to staying in the Premier League. If we do go down, though, I don’t think we can really complain because you look at the commitment and can see that people out there are trying to play football and stay up. What slightly worries me is that with the kind of players we’ve got who have terrific touch and who are good footballers… If we do get relegated then I just wonder how long it’ll be before we come back up.”
“Who were your heroes when you were a boy?” I asked him.
“I was lucky enough to play for West Ham Boys, so I was here from when I was just a 10-year old. In those days it was John Dick and Vic Keeble up front. They had a winger called Doug Wragg who all the dockers called ‘Oily’, and it was wonderful. Upton Park was all standing then, of course, and if you came in late as a little boy the dockers would pass you down to the front. They’d leave you there so you could see the game.
“There is solid support for West Ham throughout the world. I remember touring in Australia last year and we had a great big Hell’s Angel roadie who was West Ham United through and through. When I got back I sent him a shirt, and he’s proudly walking round Melbourne wearing it. We’re loved worldwide.
“This has always been a terrific club, very friendly and a real family set-up. To be part of it as a schoolboy was wonderful. I’ve got twin sons who are now at the Academy as well, so if you cut my veins they’ll bleed claret and blue. Seeing West Ham do well is as important to me and well on a par with my OBE, the sell-out concerts and hit records.
“It’s hard to pick one all-time Hammer, though. Looking back, I remember the great partnership of Keeble and Dick in 1959-60. Tony Cottee was a tremendous player, and so was Alvin Martin. Then Bobby Moore, of course, and now Joe Cole. I think Cole has been exemplary this season in the way he’s led the team and shown his commitment.
“Paolo Di Canio is a wonderful player, too. Personally I wish he was staying here because he can change a game. People criticise him and I don’t know what goes on in the changing-rooms, but as far as I’m concerned, out on the pitch he’s an extraordinary player and he seems to be committed to West Ham and you can’t really fault that.
“This club has had some marvellous players down the years and they’ve always had that reputation for playing football. Even when I was here as a little boy you never hoofed it up the pitch. You tried to play it out of defence. Nerve-wracking, yes, but it’s a style of football, and it’s great to watch. And we dream on.”
Leaving the actual shoot with Tony Cottee until Friday May 2nd, which was as late as we dared, I met Tony at Canary Wharf where we filmed a few links from the rooftop with its incredible views over London. We had decided in the main to couch the shoot positively and hope that the club would manage a ‘fabulous finish’ to escape the dreaded relegation in a season that, but for a few crumbs of joy, had covered a lamentably miserable ten months, with the first league home win only coming at the end of January.
We spent the day at different key West Ham sites such as the World Cup 1966 statue of Moore, Hurst, Peters and Wilson in the Barking Road, the notorious Cassettari’s café, where the players would often congregate before and after matches in the 50s and the 60s, and the new Club Museum back at the Boleyn Ground.
Thanks to an inspired piece of architectural planning, West Ham’s stadium corporate boxes then doubled as hotel rooms during the week, and it was in one of these that we shot the alternate stay up/go down closing scenes for the video with Cottee, as he ‘woke up’ in the hotel room in his West Ham United dressing gown, pulling back the curtains to reveal a panoramic view of the pitch, in front of which he pontificated on the what ifs or the thank Gods, depending on how the season ended. For this final scene, we had borrowed one of the many items of West Ham night wear on sale, which Cottee tried on in the club shop.
As TC posed at the entrance to the club museum, I attempted to wind him up by remarking on how much he looked like Noel Coward.
‘Who’s Noel Coward?’ he asked, perhaps not unreasonably.
‘You don’t know who Noel Coward is?’ the cameraman said, with genuine surprise.
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Just get him lined up in front of that picture of Trevor Brooking.’ The cameraman looked at me, a little confused.
‘Who’s Trevor Brooking?’ he said.
Horses. Courses.
After a couple of days’ filming, we had nearly two hours of material that made it certain our end of season programme would contain footage worth watching in addition to the five or six decent games West Ham could offer from throughout the season to date, whether they were relegated or stayed up. I was determined that we would make a good programme out of a bad season, and we had that David Essex interview.
But events overtook us.
Roeder collapsed with an operable brain tumour on Easter Monday and Trevor Brooking stood in as ‘caretaker’, but despite his motivational efforts at management in the closing weeks of the season, survival proved elusive.
On Sunday May 11th 2003, after a 2-2 draw at Birmingham City had earned Hammers their 42nd point, West Ham United were relegated from the FA Carling Premier League.
The DVD we finally produced, which you may well have a copy of, turned out to be very different to the one I had been imagining. My boss decided that no fan would want to watch two hours of disappointing defeats, so he unilaterally limited the seasons review to include extended highlights of just the games where the team had won or played well.
This was also the time when football coverage was moving from aspect ratios of 4:3 to 16:9 (look it up), and to complete this absolute dog’s breakfast, the editor decided to produce a programme in the short-lived ‘letter box’ format, reducing the final quality of the picture. Beyond belief? Of course, but perfectly in keeping with managing to somehow get one of the arguably best squads we have ever had at the club relegated. I managed to rescue some quality at the last moment by begging them to include, as a bonus feature, all the goals the club had scored that season. A pyrrhic victory, yes, but as you watch them now, you can at least see the quality evaporating before your very eyes.
The sequel to this very strange season came in the writing of Our Days Are Few. But that is, quite lidderally, another story for another day.
And website.
