Tommy Martin: Genial Greavsie a cross between Ronaldo and Chris Kamara

The Great Library of Alexandria was one of the wonders of the ancient world, thought to contain most of the knowledge accumulated by mankind.

I thought the same of YouTube this week, when I realised that it hosts what appears to be the entire back catalogue of Saint & Greavsie.

I sought out this treasure trove of 1980s football-related chortles after watching the recent tributes to Jimmy Greaves, one half of the iconic ITV duo.

Greaves turned 80 last week and was the subject of a BT Sport film about his colourful life, as well as reverent media profiles highlighting his remarkable goalscoring record, struggles with alcoholism, and rebirth as amiable TV joker.

As a child of the 1980s, it is this last bit that I remember. And it’s hard not to.

When I was a kid, living in a part of the country where we were able to poach British TV signals, Jimmy Greaves was everywhere. You couldn’t escape him.

Some kids need imaginary friends: We didn’t, we had the constant company of a middle-aged man with a droopy moustache making dad jokes.

Obviously there was Saint & Greavsie, as well as general football punditry duties.

But I’d forgotten that he also had a slot on TV-AM, ITV’s breakfast show, in which he, rather incongruously, previewed what was on television.

Greg Dyke, the programme’s producer, later said hiring Jimmy was a move to “dumb down” the show, which is quite an admission given its biggest star up to that point was Roland Rat.

There’s also lots of this on YouTube (really, the Smithsonian would want to get its act together) and it is clear that the slot was simply an excuse to get Jimmy on telly, just being Jimmy.

Anne Diamond or Nick Owen would tee up the subject of the day and then giggle themselves silly as a droll East End witticism came ambling out from beneath that furry top lip like a sleepy hedgehog emerging froma thicket.

But TV-AM was a mere side project, the ‘Frog Chorus’ to Saint & Greavsie’s ‘Sergeant Pepper’.

For those too young to remember, Saint & Greavsie was unmissable television, built around the chemistry between Greaves and his co-host, the former Liverpool and Scotland forward Ian St John.

When I say “unmissable television”, there actually wasn’t very much else on television, which made missing it quite hard.

Back then football was suspicious of live TV in much the way that Native American tribesmen were reputedly afraid to have their photos taken lest their souls be stolen.

So, Saint & Greavsie, along with the BBC’s more earnest Football Focus, served as a one-stop shop for all your football needs.

On Saturday mornings, my brother and I would rush out to get Shoot magazine (in which the omnipresent Jimmy had a nice retainer as an agony uncle for disgruntled fans), then settle in for three-day-old Littlewoods Cup highlights, an interview with Coventry manager John Sillett, a graphic announcing the postponement of Partick Thistle against Alloa, and a nod to the Bell’s Whiskey Managers of the Month.

And really, what more could you want?

It’s important to note that Saint did most of the heavy lifting here, reading autocue, introducing packages where roving reporter Martin Tyler would be get up close and personal with Dave Bassett or Lawrie McMenemy and then prompting Jim, as he, sweetly, always called him, to leaven the proceedings with his trademark gentle banter.

Picture: PA

Most of the jokes were standard fare about somebody being tight with money or drinking too much or being bad at golf.

But that didn’t matter. Saint’s other key role was to laugh uproariously at Jimmy’s gags, which he did like a donkey getting a colonoscopy.

Take this exchange from March 1989, in which the pair agreed to have a bet on the Boat Race.

GREAVSIE: “I better go for Cambridge, so you go for Oxford.”

SAINT: “Why’s that Jim?”

GREAVSIE: “Well I can hardly go into Cambridge on Monday morning and lecture the boys on advanced physics otherwise?”

SAINT: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

GREAVSIE: “Mind you, it’s a funny old game, the old boat race, the way the winning team always dip their cox in the water afterwards.”

SAINT: “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Now, Jim, for that interview with Frank McLintock...”

I remember being aware of the two other key facts about this TV colossus. My father must have told us that Greaves had also once been a truly brilliant player as well as an alcoholic.

I could square neither fact in my head.

Could this cheerful, pudgy walrus with a combover really have been the greatest goalscorer in the history of English football?

In modern terms, that would make him a cross between Cristiano Ronaldo and Chris Kamara.

And how could this genial old cove, whose response to every question was a wry shrug of the shoulders and a wisecrack, have been subject to the dark demons of addiction.

His wife Irene and he also lost their first child, Jimmy Jr, to pneumonia at just four months old.

Maybe that was why Jimmy didn’t appear to take football, or much else for that matter, too seriously.

To look back on Saint & Greavsie now is to relive a prelapsarian time. Football was imperfect then, rife with hooliganism, racism, and misogyny.

That Boat Race banter was just weeks before the Hillsborough disaster.

But it all seems so innocent now, especially when compared to today’s game in which furrowed-brow podcasters discuss tactical minutiae and social media partisans spitting bile at each other represents the prevailing discourse.

Back then, the exasperated bristle of Jimmy’s moustache at the mention of foreign goalkeepers was about as heated as things got.

Saint & Greavsie was canned in 1992 when ITV lost the rights to the new Premier League to Sky.

Everything changed then and Greaves later lamented that his lighthearted style wasn’t suited to the brash new era.

Post-Hornby descendants like Skinner & Baddiel took the piss out of Saint & Greavsie, but there is no doubt who is more fondly remembered.

They were irredeemably naff and passé by the end, and relics of a time when middle-aged white men ruled the earth. But they didn’t sneer and they loved the game and each other and it came through.

Jim was right. It is a funny old game, as the ancient parchments no doubt agreed.