Grandstand was the former flagship sports programme of the British Broadcasting Corporation which was broadcast on Saturday afternoons on BBC1 between 1958 and 2007, and from 1981 on Sunday afternoons as Sunday Grandstand on BBC2, although until 1998 the Sunday edition aired only during the summer.
The last editions of Grandstand and Sunday Grandstand were broadcast over the weekend of 27–28 January 2007.
History
During the 1950s, sports coverage on television in the United Kingdom gradually expanded. The BBC regularly broadcast sports programmes with an outside studio team, occasionally from two or three separate locations. Production assistant Bryan Cowgill put forward a proposal for a programme lasting three hours; one hour dedicated to major events and two hours showing minor events. Outside Broadcast members held a meeting in April 1958, and Cowgill further detailed his plans taking timing and newer technical facilities into consideration. During the development of the programme, problems arose over the proposed schedule which would result in the programme ending at 4:45pm to allow children's programmes to go out. Paul Fox insisted that the service was broadcast until 5:00pm to ensure a proper results service.
Three weeks before the debut of the programme, sports broadcaster Peter Dimmock favoured naming the show Out and About! with Fox persuading Dimmock to agree on a new name, which was Grandstand. Grandstand launched on 11 October 1958 from Lime Grove Studios with Dimmock as the presenter. Dimmock presented the first two editions and three weeks later, he was replaced by sports commentator David Coleman. In the autumn of 1959, Grandstand was extended by an extra 15 minutes and would finish at 5:00pm every Saturday. According to Richard Haynes in BBC Sport in Black and White, the 1960s saw the Grandstand name "become synonymous with the BBC's coverage of sport" and it "became a trusted vehicle for British viewers to access a variety of sports."
The show was one of the most recognisable on British television, dominating Saturday afternoons on the BBC's main channel and covering nearly every major sporting event in Britain such as the FA Cup Final, Wimbledon, the Grand National and the University Boat Race, as well as major international events like the Olympic Games, the Paralympic Games, the Commonwealth Games and the FIFA World Cup (from 1998 FIFA World Cup coverage would switch from Grandstand to Match of the Day branding).
From the programme's launch until the lifting of restrictions on broadcasting hours by the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications in 1972, sports coverage was one of the few programming areas which was exempt from the broadcasting hours restrictions. Instead, sporting coverage and outside broadcasts were provided with a separate quota of broadcasting hours per year by the Postmaster General. By the mid 1960s this amounted to 350 hours per year. This meant Grandstand was a key part of the BBC's Saturday afternoon schedules, as the time the programme was on the air did not count towards the 50-hour a week restriction on normal broadcasting hours.
Beginning in the early 1980s, a lunchtime news summary provided by BBC News was included in the broadcast, functioning as a programme break between Football Focus and the start of that week's live events.
Football Focus
The first item of the programme which began in the early afternoon during the football season was the football magazine show “Football Focus”. It began for several years up to 1974, on as a slot called "Football Preview", previewing the day's matches within Division One and later on the Premier League and also the FA Cup and international weekends and featured interviews with players and also the managers and in 1974 it was evolved into Football Focus which continued to be part of Grandstand until 2001 when it then was made into a tv programme in its own right.
Around the Grounds
Between the main live sporting events being shown on the day in the mid afternoon a brief segment was shown where the programme went around the football grounds just prior to the 3pm kick-offs with the on site commentators announcing the team line ups and pre match news. This was done in the format of “Final Score”.