Football Funditry? interview

Written by: Si Hawkins
Published: Monday 27th November 2017

Previously, on British Comedy Guide - as we'd say if BCG was a US drama; BCG Miami, maybe - we talked about comedians getting involved with football, from Eric Morecambe and Tommy Trinder in club boardrooms to modern comics doing proper punditry via podcasts.

The football podcast epidemic has also led to the opposite trend: football experts being funny. Writers and pundits ruminating on the game, and revealing stuff they probably couldn't reveal in print. And this phenomenon is now making its way to London mega-venue the 02 - or at least, the 02's smaller Indigo room, which is still pretty sizeable - with James Richardson's Totally Football Show. They've also booked arena comic Kevin Bridges, just to be on the safe side.

Richardson has always been more droll - droller? - than the average presenter, and surpassed himself at the very start of this season with a callback to his own career. Richardson made his name in the early '90s as the host of Gazetta Football Italia, Channel 4's Italian football show, and a memorable format that involved him sitting outside an Italian café with a cappuccino or a sundae and flicking through the football papers, which seemed like the greatest job in the world.

25 years on and the first game of this season, he was at non-league Sutton United's ground for their clash against the mighty Leyton Orient, filling in as presenter of BT Sport's coverage of the National League - and the pre-credits sequence saw him sitting at a table in the middle of Sutton's pitch with a big mug, croissants and a copy of the Non-League Paper. Fine work - but are there logistical problems with a stunt like that in the football world? Angry groundsmen? Croissant availability in Sutton?

"A table of pastries is part of my rider so no, not really," jokes the presenter. "Cueing the Sutton weather up to look Mediterranean was the difficult bit."

I bumped into Richardson at a Morrissey gig years ago, way back before Moz became completely objectionable, but after Gazzeta had finished, and was surprised to see him in the UK. Indeed, the presenter seemed under the impression that TV producers thought the same, hence he wasn't on screen as much as you'd expect ("that's probably what I was telling myself at the time," he says. "I'm back now though, just in case anyone has anything.")

One of his random post-Italy jobs was hosting darts with another moonlighting comic, Dave Gorman, but his pun-peppered presenting found a more natural long-term home in podcasts. Originally that involved hosting the Guardian newspaper's podcast, Football Weekly - so was it always funny? And did some journalists struggle with that?

"Football Weekly started that way because of the people who were on it, who'd already been using more or less that tone writing for the Guardian online," he says. "Sense of humour is a very individual thing, so certainly not everyone adopts the same tone. And thank goodness."

Possibly going a bit method with the football stuff - like Jim Carrey going full Andy Kaufman in that new Netflix doc - Richardson undertook a seismic transfer of his own this summer, moving from the Guardian's podcast to the new Totally Football Show. And now they've moved onto live shows too. How will it work?

"It's a chat with the usual chums about anything that sounds interesting - some of it things we can't say in a broadcast, certainly - and with as much participation from the audience as possible," he explains. "It's more free-ranging and relaxed than the podcast. We're letting our hair down, or some of us are anyway..."

Joining Richardson are the more hirsute Bridges, a big Celtic supporter; German football expert Raphael Honigstein, who recently released a major new biography of Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp; podcast expert and show producer Ben Green; and football writer Iain Macintosh, who is also one of the brains behind the new venture. With that in mind, we asked Macintosh to talk us through the various guests, as if they were a five-a-side team.

"Jimbo is the midfield playmaker, effortlessly pinging passes about," he says. "Kevin is going to be the mate of a mate who turns up, nutmegs everyone and it later transpires that he was a Scotland youth international. I'll be sick on my shirt before the break. The last one isn't a metaphor."

Nowadays Richardson is also back covering Italian football - and Spanish, German, French, you name it - as a mainstay of BT Sport's European football coverage. Which brings us back to those Gazetta days. Is it true that the famous al fresco setting was mainly due to budget issues: it was cheaper than a studio?

"That's always been my guess, at least partly - but then it's also true that you'd be crazy to do a programme in Italy and not show as much of the country as possible," he says. "I'm glad we did it that way - real life's always better than a studio as long as the weather doesn't get in the way, and of course that wasn't a problem we had in Italy."

Just to really nail the comedy/football angle, we asked the podcast people for their favourite football gags - which was probably a bad idea, in retrospect...

The Totally Football Show's Best/Worst Football jokes

3. "During the World Cup in Brazil, the England team visited an orphanage. 'It was heart-breaking to see their sad little faces with no hope' - said João, age six."

2. "What do you call a dog who plays football? Kennel Dogleash."

1. "Djimi Traore, Champions League winner" (YouTube)