More than Words

From radio to Ceefax to ancient scoreboards – the sweet little mysteries of following Forest from a distance.

words: Nigel Huddleston

Scout night was on a Wednesday, which was kind of awkward, because it was the night Forest played their midweek home games. My brother had flourished in the practical world of scouting, helped by a bewildering indifference to football that was hewn from a couple of trips to watch the reserves with my dad, when they still played on Saturday afternoons. Family legend records that he was more enthralled by running to the back of the old East Stand to watch the trains rumbling over Lady Bay Bridge than the exploits on the pitch.

But his Duke of Edinburgh award-winning, patrol-leading success in the scouts meant that, five years later, my reluctant attendance was expected each Wednesday – a situation made harder to wriggle out of by the fact that my dad had become a parent helper out of sympathy for the old soldier who tried to keep the troop together, taking on one of those burdensome voluntary roles where no one ever says thank you. A touch too green to rebel, I went along with the idea, though always out of my comfort zone tying sheet bends and pitching bell tents. It wouldn’t have mattered so much if Forest had remained a utilitarian, water-treading second division club, but then Brian happened.

Protracted negotiations on my release from scouts began on the morning of Thursday, November 30, 1977. I’d always preferred the scouting activities that took place away from the hut – partly because this allowed for keeping an ear to goings-on at the City Ground on Radio Nottingham, on a concealed transistor radio that would surely have been good enough to earn my spying badge, had there been such a thing. The previous evening had found my patrol out on the streets around Carrington lido, in an exercise laying signal trails with stones and sticks, a skill that would surely come in handy to fool the Russians should they target the pool as a strategic location after invading.

This was before the days of blanket commentary on every match. If you were very lucky, your game would be chosen for second-half live coverage on Radio 2; if not, there was merely a handover every 10 minutes from Radio Nottingham’s studio to the ground for an update, with a fuller report at half-time. This was a handover from whatever specialist interest music programme was scheduled for the evening, and not from a specialist football or sports slot – so if something significant happened in the 10 minutes between updates, no useful detail would be divulged. The update would simply be trailed with “we’ll be going over to the City Ground after this record, where there’s been a goal” – and then you’d wait for three minutes and 42 seconds to be put out of your misery.

On that particular Carrington night, the opportunities to hear the first-half bulletins were limited, and the half-time report was the first chance to enjoy the carnage being wrought on Aston Villa in a Fourth Round League Cup tie. We were four-nil up.

Something changed from that moment. Even if I wasn’t realistically going to be at the match on school nights, I at least needed to be in a place where I could keep as tuned into goings-on as possible. An opportunity soon presented itself to ease myself out by auditioning for The Gang Show – the city-wide scouting revue, rehearsals for which took place on a Wednesday night in a large hall above Black’s of Greenock (aka the Scout Shop), opposite the central fire station. It was more for probation than a full release, but it did present lots of opportunities for sitting around with an earphone in while other kids went through their lines and had their choreography explained to them. For me, it was here – not at Old Trafford, where Phil Thompson tripped John O’Hare and Robbo scored from the spot to give Forest the League Cup – that got the glory years rolling. It was also the start of a life enjoying and enduring many more triumphs and tribulations remotely, the details etched on the mind by radio commentators and newspaper reporters.

After the show’s run at the Theatre Royal I was never spiritually allowed back into the fold on regular scout nights. The scout master, aka Skip, was a militaristic type who in his army days, one suspected, would have had no truck with effete, namby-pamby concert party types, and who gave the impression that he felt betrayed by my leave of absence. The seed had been sown and a house move up the hill to Mapperley finally persuaded my parents that the journey was just too much. I was soon free to give Radio Nottingham’s sporadic coverage my full attention and revel in all the tension, frustration and relief that it brought – experiencing the emotional rollercoaster of being at the match, if not its impact on the physical senses.

Of course, the independence and mobility of adulthood meant I witnessed many more of the good times – and bad – in person in later years, but moving away from Nottingham for work meant that I spent several years dipping in and out as a supporter, effectively out on loan to other clubs. Despite a League Cup win in 1985, Norwich City were not much to write home about at the start of that decade. In the late-eighties watching the on-loan, teenage Kevin Campbell ripping Division Three defences to shreds for a free-scoring Leyton Orient was much more rewarding. So too was witnessing an occasionally destructive West Ham from Upton Bank’s North Bank, a team that hadn’t quite coming to terms with failing to win the league when they should have done in 1986. Landing in Brighton in the early-nineties meant being there for their fan-powered escape from going out of the league and out of business.

In pre-internet, pre-smart phone times, going to other people’s matches meant pulling in information piecemeal on Forest via whatever means available. Usually not wanting to lug a radio around, this meant relying on morsels thrown out by someone who did, or hanging on until 45 or 90 minutes for the latest – excluding the impact of late goals – scores to be read out or, if your host team was rich enough to afford one, to be flashed up on the scoreboard. At some grounds, it might even be the old-fashioned, half-time scoreboard, which involved the extra palaver of scrounging a stranger’s programme to discover whether Forest were match D (0-0) or match F (2-1), or whatever. It was only moving away from the ground, on an overheard transistor, or from the local pink or ’green un, that the result could be confirmed and more detail could be filled in.

The modern wonders of Ceefax eventually came to the rescue when not at a match. Until its advent, TV score updates would be flashed up on the screen during Grandstand’s rugby league coverage, but with the channel clearly in thrall to the London teams, this was an unreliable way to keep up with what Forest was doing.

It’s hard now to imagine what a magnificent innovation Ceefax was to the live-away football fan. There’s little useful to add on the subject after Matt Appleby did it such wonderful justice in issue seven of Bandy & Shinty, other than to note that I developed a peculiar Ceefax-watching rule system that harked back to the rudimentary reporting of those Radio Nottingham glory days. This involved imposing a rule that I could only check the scores every 10 minutes. Having absorbed the Forest news I’d then allow myself to scroll through the rest of the divisions to see what was going on, but then I’d have to turn off until the next 10-minute mark had been reached (eg, if I turned off at 3.13pm, I wasn’t allowed to look again until 3.20pm). The rule was there to convince myself that I was obsessed by neither football nor Forest, yet I see now that by saddling myself to it I merely reinforced my own tendency towards obsessive behaviour. Counselling continues.

I was fortunate a few years further on to end up with an employer with a generous company car policy and a government whose barmy approach to business mileage actually encouraged people to drive more to claim dubious tax breaks. Driving from Sussex to Nottingham became a no-brainer – for me at any rate – and there followed a spell of seeing almost every game at little cost above that of a season ticket or away match admission. Alas, this coincided with the start of the downward plunge that we’re still struggling to climb out of. The eventual arrival of family and a review of the company car regulations meant the costs rose and the will to travel diminished, reducing the number of live games and reinstating me to regular on-loan elsewhere status. When I do see Forest now, my wife always asked me: “Did you enjoy the game?” and, unable to treat the enquiry other than literally, I have to explain that – the occasional drubbing of QPR aside – it’s more an exercise in endurance for infrequent hard-earned reward than it is fun. But, of course, the important thing is just being there.

With the advent of the digital information overload, my absentee score-sourcing has switched to apps and Twitter. I still sometimes try to self-enforce the 10-minute rule, though it’s a tougher call when you know that @sportchippers and @nottmtails are handing out minute-by-minute information on who’s warming up or whether they sense that a goal is coming for Preston. And when one does, a video clip isn’t far behind, bringing the reality into the palm of your hand. There’s no question it’s progress, but it does sometimes feel that something has been lost from antique media’s unwitting ability to ratchet up the tension to intensely visceral levels, simply through its unreliability and ambivalence.

Back in the day, if you couldn’t be at the match, the important thing was not being there.