Elly Oldroyd: Not putting up with the sexism in sports media
ELLY: Well, I was a cricket obsessive as a teenager, so about the age of 14/15 I just suddenly got really into cricket having not liked it at all and not being interested in it and then became really obsessed when the West Indies were over in 1976. So The Fire in Babylon series. And the following year my dad got tickets to go to Lords for the Test Match against Australia and it was 2 days. So he got tickets on Thursday and Friday, and he took my brother on the Friday and he took me on the Thursday. And in order for me to take a day off school, he wrote to my headmistress and said, ‘I would like to take Eleanor out of school for a day. She has expressed a desire to be the first woman cricket correspondent of The Times. So I feel this would be an educational visit for her’.
And actually I don’t think I had. I think this is something he’d completely made up, this idea of being the first woman cricket correspondent on The Times. It was a very academic girls’ school and I think the head thought, Well, of course anything that our girls want to do they should be able to do. So she agreed and I went along, and it rained all day and I think we saw about half an hour of play in the entire day! But I just have these incredible memories of walking around the grounds, so walking underneath the old grandstand, which was, it still is a covered walkway, and sheltering under that.
And then seeing some of the Australian players walking towards us. Their white jumpers with the green V and the green caps and just thinking, Wow, these are just giants of sports. And actually that’s quite funny to think about that that actually my sporting heroes and my cricket heroes were the West Indian players and the Australian players. So yes, that was the first time I thought actually being a sports journalist, getting paid to watch cricket all day, was going to be something to aspire to!
SA: And you said that your dad took your brother on the Friday and you on the Thursday. So did he generally treat you equally in terms of taking you along to sport?
Elly: Yes, well, we didn’t go to see a lot of sport together growing up actually. I’ve got two brothers, two younger brothers. We went to watch cricket in Canterbury quite a bit because my grandparents lived down in Kent so we were a big cricket-loving family and we used to sometimes go to Worcester to watch them play as well. But we didn’t go to football particularly. The first time I went to football was actually with my middle brother, with my brother who is two years younger than me, Andrew.
And he became a Birmingham City fan at school because we grew up in Shropshire. We grew up in South Shropshire where there was no sport around really to go to. But because one of his teachers was a Birmingham fan, he became a Birmingham City fan. And so we started to go together in the mid to late 70s when it was a horrible place to go to. It was violent and it was, St Andrews, in a not very nice part of Birmingham, very scary getting the train up there and walking down to the ground.
And then we’d get opposing fans – I remember going to see Birmingham against Leeds and walking out afterwards, and all the Leeds fans had been kept behind in the away end and they were just lobbing half bricks at the Birmingham fans! It was just extraordinary to think about it now. But I just loved going. I loved going to watch football and just got caught up in that tribalism and that excitement about it. So it was quite a natural thing to go and watch sport from my teens onwards really.
SA: And do you think you were aware at the time that there weren’t women playing cricket or football at that level? Did it occur to you at the time?
[0:03:39]
Elly: I don’t think it did. I was aware obviously there were girls at my school who were incredibly sporty, and I wasn’t sporty at all, so I had no aspirations to play sport whatsoever. In fact I would actively avoid playing sport if I could. But I think at my school if you excelled in a particular field, so if you were really musical you were really encouraged, or if you were really academic you were encouraged to follow that path. If you were really sporty you were encouraged. But if you fell below the sort of B team standard, there was nothing for you really. So I just, I fell out playing sport really quite early and I do regret that actually. I think it’s sad that I missed out on everything that we know sport gives you.
Obviously we watched sport all the time. We watched Grandstand and we watched Wimbledon and we watched the Olympics and Match of the Day. So if you were watching Wimbledon or the Olympics then you were seeing great sporting heroines. You were seeing Mary Peters. You were seeing Chris Evert and Evonne Goolagong and all of these extraordinary women who played these individual sports. And that’s the thing, it was the individual sports, the athletics or the tennis and women’s team sports didn’t ever really get shown apart from the odd hockey international at Wembley which would get on every so often and yeah, it didn’t feel like an odd thing to me at the time when it should have done.
SA: Interesting because we’re a very similar age actually and I look back at my own history and think actually I don’t remember me being aware of it being an issue in the way that we do now really. When did a career in sport, in the media, come to you – aside from your dad saying you should be doing it, or suggesting it – planting the seed?
Elly: Well I think from that seed I then, when I left school and went to university I thought, I’ll give it a go. I’ll do a bit of sports journalism or I’ll try and do some student journalism and I was – it’s these little tipping points, these little moments where you meet someone who encourages you and gives you that idea that you can do something - in my first year at university, one of my friends was in the year above me at college and one of her friends was sports editor of the student newspaper at Cambridge and she was a woman called Ann.
And so there she was doing this role as sports editor of the student newspaper. And she was a big cricket fan as well. And because I saw her doing it and she then encouraged me and I said I want to write about sport, she said, Well okay, well I do the cricket of course because I’m the sports editor so this is my job. You can go and do the hockey. So I went and covered men’s hockey in my first year at university. And I just had this feeling of, Oh my God, I’m going to get caught out because I know nothing about men’s hockey, but actually you can work it out, work out what’s happening if you know how team sports work.
And then in my second year I then took over from her as sports editor and then I got to cover the cricket and because you’ve got a decent standard of cricket to watch obviously because it’s Cambridge University, so the counties at the start of the season in April and May would come and play games there. And so I interviewed David Gower was the first sort of serious sporting interview I did. And he was charming as you’d expect. But you play at being a student journalist, you don’t really think it’s going to be my career long-term. But when I graduated I applied for jobs. Didn’t get anywhere and then went and worked in my local radio station in Worcester and went back to live at home and worked for £5 a day just doing work experience for them.
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So £5 a day which paid my train fare to Worcester and then my editor, my news editor, I said to him, I want to cover sport and he said, Yes, of course. And this was 1984/1985 when there were no women doing that. No women really on the radio or very few covering sport at all. But he said, Yes, of course, why shouldn’t you? That kind of pattern in a way, of my headmistress, my friend at university, my first news editor, who never turned round and said, You can’t do this because you’re a woman, just laid that path for me to follow. So I think I was very fortunate but I kind of worked at it, I did work hard at it.
SA: And was print journalism and newspapers an option you considered because you were working on the newspaper etc at Cambridge?
Elly: Well I applied for a newspaper graduate jobs and didn’t get anything. Didn’t get anywhere. And I do remember going for an interview with one newspaper group, sort of regional newspapers, and this guy talking to me, discussing sport with me for quite a long time . and then at the end of it saying, ‘Well it’s been very interesting discussing rugby football with a little blonde!’ And that was it, but he didn’t offer me a job. So actually in the end I took my fate into my own hands I think really and went back to this news editor who had said, Well yes of course you should be able to do sport, and started off 4 days a week, just on doing a week’s work experience which then turned into a year and a half.
SA: And hats off to him then for getting it started - we talk about male allies and the mentors and so on?
Elly: Absolutely, absolutely. I think if I hadn’t been able to broadcast I would have been found out quite quickly and if I hadn’t known about sport – and actually there’s a story that one of my friends tells – who I met actually at New Road in Worcester in about 1985 and is still one of my best friends now, Duncan. And he says, that he remembers me sitting in the press box at New Road, and it was an open press box, there wasn’t (?) a little sound-proof booth and being surrounded by all these male journalists and having to phone in my report on the hour. And every time I phoned my report in, the whole press box fell silent and listened to every word I was saying.
And at about tea-time on the first or second day, the chap who was sitting next to me turned round and said, ‘You do know what you’re talking about, don’t you?’ Of course the assumption was that I wouldn’t know what I was talking about because I was female and then this, oh okay, right, you’ve proved that you know what … and I think this is the case for women in pretty much every walk of life actually, you just have to prove yourself and you have to keep proving yourself and you can’t afford to make mistakes. Or if you do make mistakes, you are judged much more harshly for it.
SA: Did it feel as if you’d fallen straight into your dream job – covering cricket and as you say, interviewing and talking about cricket?
Elly: It did a bit actually yes. I do remember ‘cos I couldn’t drive at that stage but jumping on my bike and putting my phone, ‘cos you had to take your phone with you and then plug it in in the press box and my portable recorder, and putting it in my bike basket and cycling down to New Road! And having to pinch myself because, yeah, it did feel, how come I’m doing this so soon? So I think, I had quite a charmed life and that was, I think, down to David – David Holdsworth – and he became the Head of the English Region for the BBC so I like to think he was rewarded …
SA: We should give him a name check, shouldn’t we?
[0:11:00]
Elly: Exactly, exactly! You are absolutely right, champions, male champions are very very powerful, male advocates, very powerful for women in any walk of life.
SA: BBC Shropshire, you went in 1988 I think on to a national station, so you moved across to the BBC to work more on news. So why the shift away from sport then?
Elly: Well, I think when I went to Radio Shropshire, so I had a year and a half at Radio Wyvern in Worcester and then about two and a half years at Radio Shropshire where I did cricket and I did ice hockey, but because Shropshire wasn’t a very sporty, wasn’t exactly a sport hotbed you know, so there was Shrewsbury Town, there was Telford Tigers ice hockey, there was Shropshire Cricket in the summer and there were a few kind of sport names. There was RAF Cosford where they used to do athletics. So there were a few sporting events that happened. But there wasn’t enough work doing just doing sport so started doing news as well, so I was a news reporter for part of the week and then sport at the weekend.
And the person who kind of then paved the way for me was Sybil Roscoe. She was at Radio Shropshire with me and then she got a job at Newsbeat on Radio 1, and then recommended me to the news editor. So that was my first step into national broadcasting and I’m so glad I did that because to learn to be a news journalist, it just makes you a better-rounded person I think and a better-rounded journalist. It was an extraordinary time actually because it was late 80s, so ’88 to 1991 and we had things like the Hillsborough disaster obviously happened while I was there. Things like The Herald of Free Enterprise. Lockerbie. There was the hostage crisis in Lebanon. There was the ongoing crisis in Northern Ireland.
So it was a really fascinating time to work in news but I still did the odd sport story to keep my hand in, but then the Head of Sport at the time in radio, Bob Shennan, who is now Managing Director of Radio I think made the decision in about 1990 that he wanted to get more women on the air doing sport. The year before I joined, he employed Charlotte Nichol who was the first woman to do football on the radio.
And it was hard. I mean it was really hard for her and she will tell you. The atmosphere was awful. She was made to feel really small and a lot of the men in that department would go out of their way to try and make her feel inferior and undermine her. And so the following year when I went it was a little bit easier. So she had taken the flack as it were I think and I admire her for what she did because it really wasn’t a very easy atmosphere. She stuck it out and she moved into production and she became BBC Radio’s England football producer and did an incredible job and still works in football now.
But I think it was slightly easier for me because Charlotte had been the first and yeah, so I then went to present programmes and do football and the following year went and did my first Olympics in 1992. So I lucked out really, I came at a good time.
SA: And can you remember the moment they told you that you were going to be going to Barcelona to the Olympics?
Elly: I just remember it being , yeah, I just remember being so excited and so much … remembering all the Olympics that you have covered in the past, and I suppose everyone was talking about it at that point and thinking, you know, there will be a team that will go. But then actually it was kind of bitter-sweet because about a month before I went, my mother developed breast cancer and I just remember taking the call at work from her to say that she was going into hospital for this operation and just that, Oh my God I don’t know whether I should go or not and talking to her and her saying, of course you should go, of course you should go and so I spent quite a lot of money on phone calls back home from Barcelona and fortunately she had the operation and came through it and is still going strong aged 89.
[0:15:08]
But it was a difficult time. And I remember working so hard out there and never feeling like I could take a break and never going to look around Barcelona or just doing … every hour that was put in front of me because I thought, that’s what you should do and so I never took a breath. I never really appreciated it and I kind of learned then subsequently that you have to go and see the city. You’ve got to get out of the Olympic bubble and explore and get a sense of the place ‘cos otherwise you are not telling the story of the Olympics really.
SA: And you’ve since been a lead presenter and commentator at 9 more Games!
Elly: Well in fact it’s 11. Tokyo would have been my 12th. But this is summer and winter, so I’ve done every summer Games since ’92 up to Rio and then I’ve done 4 winter Olympics. So 7 summer and 4 winter so far and it’s the thing that has defined my career in lots of ways I think, those extraordinary 3-week chunks of time where the focus of the sporting world is on this particular place. As far as favourites go, I mean I loved Sydney because people in Australia are passionate about sport and it looked so amazing as well.
I remember broadcasting on the opening night, it was a crazy opening ceremony, and then the next morning doing a programme on the steps of the Sydney Opera House and feeling, wow, you are at the centre of the sporting world at one of the most iconic times in this city’s whole history. So that was amazing but it’s also the experiences that you have when you are there as well so the social time, it’s the people you’re with, it’s the way it works for you.
So in 2000 I had my daughter with me so she was only 8 months old, 7 months old. My then husband Nick was out working on the Games as well. So we took Erin out with us and my mother-in-law came and looked after the baby. They had set us all up in a 2-bedroom flat. So rather than hotels we were in a 2-bedroom apartment. But because we were married obviously we shared a bedroom and then it meant that Nick’s mum came, we flew her out, and she had the bedroom, and she took Erin around Sydney and had the most amazing time with her.
So that was a really happy time because it was very sort of, I felt that I could do my job and be a mum. Yeah, so each Games meant different things to me at different stages of my life and so actually when it came to 2012 - because my second daughter was born in 2001, so I had 2 children within 17 months - but when it came to 2012, I knew as soon as we got the Games, so when the announcement was made, one of the first things I thought was, in 2012 the girls will be 12 and 11 and they will understand and appreciate what the Olympics means and to have it in your city and why every few years both their parents have disappeared off.
So in 2008 when they were 8 and 7, they spent pretty much that whole summer playing with grandparents. Then in 2012 I remember walking round the Olympic park with them and saying, do you get why this is so important to mum and dad? And they said, Yes we really do. This is really, really cool. That was a special time as well.
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SA: When I told my husband I was talking to you today, he said, he’s not a man of mass flattery, but he said, She is great - Eleanor. Whenever I hear she’s hosting a show I know it’s in safe hands, which is lovely. And I’m sure there’s almost that chaos behind the scenes, especially live sport on live radio. So how do you remain so calm or at least you sound it, on radio?
Elly: It’s experience, it’s just doing it a lot. I’m sure I wasn’t calm in the early days at all. I think about doing live sports programmes in the early 90s and I probably wasn’t all that great at it but you just learn how to do it. You learn how to cut out the noise I suppose and to let the adrenalin give you a boost rather than scare you. Yeah, and doing your research so you talk to Clare Balding and she will always say that she does so much research, and if you know what to expect and you’ve got things written down, you’ve got enough notes written down in front of you. So standing in Olympic Park, I’m thinking about standing in the Olympic Park in Rio in 2016 when we had just come out of the pool. Adam Peaty had been swimming.
I was about to go to the gymnastics and it was Max Whitlock and we had a medal being won in the canoeing and there was another medal and a shooter was going for a medal up at the shooting range. And actually it’s amazing what you can do if you’ve just got written down in front of you, ‘shooting’, the name of the person or the athlete, the name of the broadcaster. Having everything on one sheet of paper makes life very much easier. If you’re having to flick through things all the time. But then I couldn’t have done that in 1992 or 1996. The more you do it the better at it you get. And I think experience is irreplaceable really.
SA: And do things go wrong live on air? Any experiences you could share at all?
Elly: Oh my goodness, yes. Undoubtedly. Well actually, and going back to that, standing in the Olympic Park in Rio. It was a really strange Games, weather-wise, because there was days when it was swelteringly hot and humid and there were days when it was cold and grey and wet and the International Broadcast Centre is always – every IBC I’ve ever been into – is freezing cold because they blast in the air conditioning. So you are going from a hot, humid atmosphere outside to freezing cold inside and of course I’ve got a cold and I’ve got a really horrible cold. And I was just starting a 6-hour programme, so going on air midday till 6 o’clock in the evening.
And standing in the Olympic Park and suddenly starting to cough and I couldn’t stop coughing and I couldn’t speak because I was coughing. So I just picked up this chesty cold and I think it was Connor McNamara who was there with me to talk about the boxing and when you’re talking and you’re talking and you have to somehow say to somebody, my voice is about to go, I can’t speak, I can’t speak without coughing. And in the end I think I had to sort of cough and say, Right okay, I think at this point Connor, you’re going to have to take the microphone and talk for a bit because I can’t talk anymore. And so at that point I was taken off air, taken to my hotel room - in the context of where we are at the moment with corona virus - I had to quarantine for two days in my hotel room. Our lovely fixer, Brazilian fixer, took me to the doctor and explained what was wrong with me and they gave me all sorts of drugs and I was banned from being on the air for about 2 days.
[0:22:30]
And that was horrible because you think, when you are there to work, you are there to broadcast, and if you are missing out on things it’s just an awful feeling. So it does happen occasionally. I’ve got a terrible cold as well at The Ashes as well in Brisbane in 2017 but there’s nothing you can do really. You just have to accept it.
SA: I was really sad this year when the Friday Sports Panel finished, and I think particularly because it gave voice to so many incredible female athletes. At the moment, do you feel there is enough coverage of women’s sport on TV and radio?
Elly: We’ve made incredible progress bearing in mind where we were 20 years ago. It’s extraordinary really because I think you go back to what we were saying about, there used to be the Olympics, there used to be Wimbledon, you would see female athletes. But in team sports, you really wouldn’t and I think that it all kind of started to change around 2012 really. So, with people going to watch the women’s football team at Wembley and thinking, wow this is incredible, and then increased professionalism and it’s this virtuous circle of better coverage, increased professionalism, more money, more time that the athletes could spend learning their trade, getting better at it, making a better and a more professional product.
So it’s taken a long time and it has taken a lot of banging heads against brick walls I think but I think after 2012 it was a real turning point and then you then had a generation of people who were confident. I think about Rachael Heyhoe Flint, who was again one of the most influential women I think in women’s sport and one of the best people I ever met. And such an extraordinary advocate for her sport and the fact that she used to write her own match report for the Daily Telegraph, after captaining the England women’s cricket team she would then go write and file her report.
But in order to be able to have that confidence to speak out for your sport, it must have been crushing for women who wanted to speak out on behalf of their sport but there weren’t the outlets you know, because sports pages particularly - and I think the sporting landscape has changed as well - but certainly when I was starting out it was all about pages in newspapers. And the sports editors were all men and the focus was all on men’s sport and I do think that men’s football just dominates the landscape in a way that nothing else does, and I think actually that all other sports apart from men’s football struggled to find space in newspapers.
But I think the fact that the broadcast media landscape has changed as well and there is much more access to blogs and to podcasts and to on-line coverage as well has improved things and it’s given that, allowed that basis to build up. But anyway it’s a very longwinded way of saying it, but the Friday Sports Panel. I loved doing that because it was invented really to try and tap into what came out of London 2012. So the stories of athletes and allowing people to have a voice across men’s sport, women’s sport, disability sport as well. And it was a really lovely programme to do and it was fun to do.
But Controllers have different things that they want to do with their network sometimes and the one thing that I am happy about is that we’ve managed on a Thursday night, with Darren Campbell to come and slightly take some of the elements of that and to have great voices, great women role models. Hopefully it’s opened up an idea for people to think, well yeah, we can get people like the Richardson-Walshes for example - Kate and Helen who are regulars - Helen Glover who was a regular voice on it as well. Becky Adlington, I think there are more people who are doing it now and maybe we played a small part in that, maybe we didn’t but I was really proud that we did it.
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SA: I loved listening. When 5 Live was accused of being a Radio Bloke, I think the phrase was, a few years ago, you wrote an article in the Guardian saying that was absolutely not your experience. But do you feel, I guess we’ve talked a little bit about that, haven’t we, that you’ve had the same opportunities as male broadcasters through your career?
Elly: Well I do really, I do, and I think it’s – I came in at the start of women getting roles in broadcasting and then obviously Clare Balding came in, I hadn’t been there for very long, but she was instantly a natural broadcaster. Occasionally you meet people who are absolute naturals and Clare was from day one. But yes I think it was that right time when bosses felt it was the right thing to do, you know, to give opportunities to women, although I think that there was that sense at the time and it still exists to a degree, that if you have a woman doing it you don’t need another woman. So she is ‘the’ female football reporter or ‘the’ football broadcaster.
And I think what we’re seeing now actually in the cricket, and it struck me when I was just doing test matches last week was that you’ve got, Isa Guha presenting, the face for BBC TV. You’ve got Isa and Alison commentating. You’ve got Ebony Rainford Brent on Sky as well. You’ve got me on the radio. So actually you’ve got really people (unclear) centre but it’s still very male dominated. We’re a long way away from 50-50 and maybe we never will be. [0:28:23] But the opportunities are there and I think it’s for young women and girls to be able to look and say, Look okay if she’s doing it, then I can do it. And actually kind of going back a little bit to when I first thought, well maybe I can work in sport, the only person that I knew who was doing it was Julie Welch in The Observer. And I saw her by-line on the Sunday and it was clearly a woman writing about football and made me think, Oh I can do that.
And I think the more that we’ve had of those sort of examples, the better. But I think people employing me have never stood in my way so I’ve always had opportunities. I think what was hard then, but I didn’t see it so much and is hard now in a different way, is people telling you you shouldn’t be on air because you’re female. So the social media abuse that I’ve seen young women broadcasters get now, I just feel I’m so glad that social media wasn’t around then because maybe I wouldn’t be where I am now. So I used to get people writing to me to say, you shouldn’t be on the radio, get back in the kitchen. What do you know about it, you’re female?
But in order to actually take the time to write a letter, sit down with a pen and a piece of paper, an envelope and a stamp and find out the address and take it to the post box is considerably more effort than sitting on social media and typing in something abusive. So I think attitudes have definitely changed and actually I saw, there’s a young Sky presenter called Kate Mason who I’ve known for a while – she came through one of the BBC opportunity programmes and somebody had tweeted something horrible to her – just something personal and nasty – and she had retweeted it and the amount of supportive comments she got was brilliant. And that’s changed as well I think, that has now become, people realise that of course women are perfectly capable of doing it.
SA: And do you feel you’ve always been, or confident you’ve been equally paid to your male counterparts in terms of the roles you’ve done across the years?
[0:30:28]
Elly: Let me take a large slug of coffee before I answer that question! It’s such a difficult question to answer because, as I said, I’ve got kids, I’ve got two kids. And so when it came to 2000, I went to the Olympics with my baby and my then husband and the BBC helped that to happen, or certainly never stood in my way. But I then had another child 17 months later and so I stepped back from presenting mainstream programmes for a few years and once you step back it’s quite difficult to step back up again. And throughout the time that my children were small, I was given opportunities, so I didn’t miss an Olympics, I didn’t miss (covering?) Olympics – I did 2004 when they were 4 and 3. I did 2003 when they were 8 and 7 and you have to make it work with childcare and so on.
But fortunately, you know when the Olympic Games – until 2020 – you know when sporting events are going to be so you can plan. You can say to the grandparents, please can you have them? But then you develop this, almost this gratitude that you are being allowed to carry on working. That, oh thank you so much for giving me those opportunities to work while I’m … and allowing me to balance my life. And I wanted to be able to spend time with my kids as well and to be there to do homework and take them to ballet and all these things and to be a good mum to them.
And also I got divorced as well when they were quite small and so that made life a bit more complicated as well and I had a great relationship with their dad, and we still do have a great relationship, and he did his share of the childcare as well. But for me, personally, no I don’t think I did get paid as much as a man in my position but I don’t regret the time I had with my girls – they are now 20 and 19 – and they understand actually that it was compromised. It was a balancing act. But I don’t know how you get over that really. It’s very, very difficult and I think that sense of gratitude almost of imposter syndrome that women tend to have is a real thing and I wish I could say to young women now, don’t undervalue yourself.
Don’t get the defensive. Thank you so much for my maternity rights because they are your rights and don’t ever think of yourself as not deserving of it. I think I only got over the imposter syndrome about 5 years ago. You know, that feeling that I deserved to be where I was.
SA: And it’s sad isn’t it? I think it’s an age thing. I think I’m very similar in my turning fifty, whatever, I think yeah, sad that it takes 50 years to get there isn’t it?
Elly: Absolutely.
SA: I’m going to move you on and I know you’ve covered some really hard-hitting debates and documentaries over the years and you’ve won many awards in the process. Why are you so passionate about that area of your work?
Elly: It’s about story-telling, I think. If you want to tell stories about people’s situations – and I look back now and I think actually there are more things we could have done and things that we almost shied away from. I look at the stories about abuse in gymnastics and think, well, if we’d been a bit braver, we could have told those stories earlier. But I remember doing programmes about funnily enough talking about maternity rights and about how hard it was for women to be able to take time off for children when they played elite sport. And I think that has slightly been tackled now, I think it’s slightly easier but it helps if you are Jessica Ennis-Hill and have endorsements and Jess is incredible, what an incredible athlete she is and how inspiring she is. But if you don’t have financial backup (and support) it’s really difficult to carry on and be an athlete.
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SA: And are there other topics you’d like to cover in the future? Would you like to do more of the documentary-led pieces?
Elly: I think, I am sure there are and I hope they are there - obviously at the moment everything is slightly on hold - but things like Black Lives Matter as well and that’s something I think that’s pulled us all of us up and made us think, well we didn’t really have the honest debates. Did I really talk? And I suppose it all sort of broke in the middle of lockdown with the George Floyd tragedy. And I remember talking to Darren Campbell about it on the air and about how this had been his life and friends that I’ve never discussed it with, and Ebony Rainford-Brent is a great friend – and seeing her speaking out on Sky has made me think, why did we not tell this, why could we not tackle this earlier? So, it’s things that you know are there and maybe their time comes that they have to be discussed, so I do hope that we do get the chance to do that.
SA: The podcast is called The Gamechangers, and it’s about game-changing women in sport and so many of the trailblazers I’ve spoken to in previous series like Clare Balding and Jo Tongue and Jacqui Oatley have all talked about you and how they were inspired by you. How does that make you feel now when you hear that?
Elly: Well I think it’s incredibly lovely, incredibly sweet of them to say that and I yeah, I feel very humbled by that because I’m incredibly proud of what they’ve done and every single woman who makes it in this business has to make sacrifices and has to compromise something about their lives I think in some way. And Jackie was so strong when she put up with the rubbish hat she got at the time. She was a real trailblazer. I would never have been brave enough to do football commentary because I think at the time actually, women commentators were still … I missed out on doing commentary really at that stage of my career in the late 90s, early 2000s. I deliberately turned away from that because I thought I would be judged so harshly, you’ve got to be so good and so beyond reproach or beyond criticism, otherwise people will criticise you.
And you think now, why? Why are so people so harsh on female commentators? It was this most ridiculous thing about, Oh your voice gets too squeaky! It’s ludicrous, it’s just stupid to think that. As if men’s voices never get shrill. And I think Clare has been so brave with the way that she’s talked about her personal life and opened up and become a true national treasure but she wouldn’t have done what she’s done if she hadn’t been unbelievably good at it. And as I said, the talented broadcaster that I first met when she was fresh out of university. And also this extraordinary work ethic that she has as well.
And for Jo as well to take on the unbelievably male-dominated world. I remember when women were first admitted to the PFA dinner - and I think I went the first year that they admitted women to the PFA dinner - and it was a really horrible atmosphere in lots of ways. It’s really blokey and I remember being there with one of the very attractive female sports presenter and walking with her to the ladies loo, ‘cos she said, Are you going to the loo? I said, Yeah. She said, Will you come with me? So I was kind of like her wing-woman and she walked between these tables of young footballers all just leering in the most horrible way and this blokey world is changing for the better now, but yeah, throughout the 90s and until quite recently it was a difficult place to be in.
[0:38:50]
You had to have a thick skin and you think about the Me Too movement now, and if we’d talked about that then, I wonder whether we’d have got jobs. And then I do think I’ve put up with things – you know – you do turn a blind eye, you do smile prettily, laugh off remarks because you don’t want to make a fuss. You don’t want to make a big deal about it. You don’t want to damage these fragile male egos for God’s sake because you worry about your future. You worry about your job. So even though I had those strong male advocates that I talked about, my bosses, there were plenty of people that would have done anything to undermine me or make me feel small or just put me in my place.
SA: Finally, we feel it’s a more positive place now for women coming into sports media, so for women listening to this podcast, who are starting on that journey of ether journalism or broadcasting, what advice would you give to them today?
Elly: Work hard. Know your subject and those are basic things. I do think it’s hopefully a better place to be and a more welcoming place. Don’t ever feel that you are less qualified than a guy. Do anything within reason, take opportunities that are offered to you. So when I started out in local radio, I did everything that was put in front of me, you know. So I presented programmes, I reported on different things, I went and got the tea and helped other people out whenever I could. Be someone who’s nice to work with because that makes a big difference. If you are a nice person then people will give you opportunities.
Listen to people who have done it already. Learn from people who are just a little way ahead of you. It doesn’t have to be people who have been doing it for nearly 30 years like I have, it can be people who are just a year ahead. And you’ve got to love it because it is hard work and it is antisocial sometimes but it’s so rewarding and I just feel so fortunate that I’ve done it and I do have to pinch myself sometimes to think …
I was in the Bubble, in the Cricket Bubble recently and I was just sitting in the bar in a hotel in Manchester having a long chat to Michael Holding, going all the way back to that 1976, Fire in series. Was one of my idols, ‘whispering death’ as they called him, cos you couldn’t hear him coming and he bowled so fast. And I just sat there thinking this is just, if I could show the 14 year old me where I am now, then you would have to pinch yourself ‘cos you can’t quite believe it. So I never lose that sense of wonderment and love and appreciation of the job that I do.
[0:41:45]
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