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Not necessarily manipulation, but there are a lot of sycophantic royalists who probably felt it their patriotic duty to vote despite not having any interest in sport.

Certainly in Zara's case, in the wake of the various scandals there is no question of the result being anything other than above board in terms of being an accurate representation of the votes received - nobody would dare fiddle it.

I don't disagree with you Steve, and am certainly not accusing the Beeb of corruption here, but that 2006 result did come before all the scandals came to light. 2007 was the year that contained the various scandals for Richard and Judy, Ant and Dec, Blue Peter, the Queen trailer...

That being said, there's no way that SPOTY would have been fixed. Worth saying too that 2006 was an infamously awful year for British sport. The England football team had disappointed in the World Cup, the cricket team were being flogged in the Ashes, Andy Murray was just emerging (and Tim Henman was quickly fading) so no tennis starts, etc. I think that a number of people would have voted for Zara as a sort of 'having a laugh' vote, coupled with the royal sycophancy.

2006 certainly wasn't a bad year for Europe's Ryder Cup team - with Darren Clarke playing a huge role in their victory in such difficult personal circumstances.

According to the Guardian he was 1/8 with the bookies to win SPOTY that year. Then again, he *did* say before - and has said since - that he didn't really want to win it, because he didn't want to be seen as having won it simply because his wife died. Absolutely understandable - though how much *this* might have swung it in Zara's favour will probably never be known for sure.

Safe to say that there wouldn't have been so much of a fuss if Beth Tweddle, Nicole Cooke or Joe Calzaghe had won.

At least back then the Beeb released the voting figures, which show that Zara won it fairly convincingly - 221,514 votes (32.5% of the total) against Darren's 144,310 (21.2%) and Beth's 88,352 (13.0%). They didn't do so for 2018 or 2019, of course - supposedly to bring SPOTY in line with Strictly...



We'll probably never know how close it was between Geraint Thomas and Harry Kane, or just how great Ben Stokes' winning margin was.

On a more positive note, here's the last few minutes of the 1983 event:



Gracious speeches by Bobby Charlton (thoughts are still with him following Jackie's departure last week) and Steve Cram, and despite the ropey picture quality you can laugh at *and* with Murray Walker as he tries to get to grips with a McLaren F1 car. And, of course, Des makes it look like he'd always been hosting the show, when in actual fact this was the first time he did it after Frank Bough started doing breakfasts.

I'm sure Phillip did all the Christmas holiday mornings from the broom cupboard in 1986. This might have been when Gordon the Gopher first appeared as well?

Spotted this on the Ark - non sync cuts galore and a caption rolling about the screen from BBC Wales, not to mention snazzy shaded keying on the globe

https://www.tvark.org/?page=media&mediaid=57500

Eurosport (v1.0) ceases transmission...

Didn't stay off air for long of course, as TF1 stepped in and saved the day.

There was something similar on the 1970 election repeat when there was a non-sync cut, with the captions flying all over the screen. Presumably the capgens didn't like it.

Correct, this is the second appearance of "Gordon Gopher"



This appears to be 30th December 1986 going by the rundown of programmes. I saw a still once of the Xmas 1986 morning broom cupboard continuity which showed them using the Breakfast Time clock!

I was going to post this ages ago, but I can't remember which thread or what it was in relation to, so have it here instead...

Does anyone think that once a discussion on one video gets to about 6 posts, so showing obvious traction, it should be spun out into a separate thread?

Far too often I either read this thread after a few days and find the topic has already moved on, or find people talking about 3 completely different things at once

Depends on the video. Some videos don't warrant more than a passing comment, if anything. On occasion a video will, like that Talking Telephone Numbers clip with the gallery talkback that managed to fill about six pages in this thread alone, but it also spawned a thread of its own later on. That's usually an exception to the rule though - I'd say most videos are primarily an example of Channel Y's coverage of Monkey Tennis, somebody following up with "Channel Z took that too, here's how they did that", and beyond that there isn't much else to say about it aside from discussing the event in the video, before a new video entitled Arm Wrestling with Chas & Dave is posted instead.

To spin something off just because it gets to six posts doesn't necessarily mean its going to make a great thread on its own. Of course if people learnt how to (properly) quote what they're replying to (especially when your reply is not directly going below what you're responding to), things would be far easier (and I know I've been banging on about forum etiquette a lot, but that decrees that you should only quote what you're replying to (if its more than one post above where your new post will be).