Grandstand

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."