I had a memory today of watching Big League Soccer with my Dad many years ago, when the one hour (or was it less?) of highlights on a Tuesday evening with Brian Moore was the only English football we got on TV. Sometimes we were told by the lady who came on to tell us what was coming on next that "Big League Soccer didn't arrive this week", and instead we got highlights of a German Bundesliga match, which always seemed to be high-scoring and even now, in my memory of his voice, I could not figure out what kind of accent the English-speaking commentator had. Was he English? Was he German, but spoke perfect English?
Big League Soccer, if I remember correctly, featured extended highlights of one match, all the goals from all the other matches, and finished with shorter highlights from another one. When the goals round-up was on, the commentators always seemed to same thing when somebody scored: it's there! And that was my Dad's joke for a while. He would say "it's there!" whenever somebody came close to scoring and he maybe thought I wasn't watching. And, of course, I thought I was very funny every time.
I couldn't find an "it's there" moment but I did find footage of Brian Moore doing something that seems so romantically quaint now: him reading viewer's letters. Can you imagine all those people watching Big League Soccer and then pulling out their writing paper to write to Brian Moore? I'm sure I composed many letters in my head to him. What I found the most amusing is how he reads out every writer's complete address and he is sure to correct himself if he gets a street name or house number wrong. Oh those innocent days! Which, at that time of football hooliganism, Olympic boycotts, Falkland Wars we didn't think was all sweet and rosy.
(When I look it up, I get The Big Match. Somebody help me, was it not Big League Soccer that we watched with Brian Moore? Different name in England, maybe?)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YnlLWwemYYA
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