Do you remember when Soccer AM first hit our screens? The show was a revelation. True, much of those early years have aged poorly, but in terms of seminal football shows it caught its wave perfectly. It’s the kind of show I wish I’d come up with.

I was thinking about it this week when out of the blue I received a message from James Long, better known in the football fraternity as “Rocket”.

Rocket was a producer on the show, coming up with many of its iconic sketches, and he’s now started his own production company. After a brief chat, he explained that he was putting out feelers to anybody in football that had fresh ideas around podcasts and TV shows. On the one hand I feel he’s come to the right place, on the other, TV is one tough business.

The truth is that TV has scarred me a little bit, so I’m a little nervous about picking up a career that had never really started. Let me explain.

When I retired, my wife told me that I was not welcome in the house during the day, presumably my presence would interfere with the tight schedule that the mailman keeps. So I obliged.

She gave me a year to do what I really wanted to do, and make it work. And what I really wanted to do was write treatments for TV, develop them and intimately get a show made. Treatments are essentially ideas that are used to get a bite from TV producers who then help to take them to the next stage.

One year later it seemed I’d had no takers. Two years later, four of my ideas appeared on TV. I thought that football was ruthless, but TV is on another level entirely. I found out pretty quickly that the word of an executive means nothing and that even the most well rounded idea will be bastardised by a room full of people desperately trying to prove their worth to somebody higher up the food chain.

If you’re naive in the land of TV, as I undoubtedly was, and you’re reliant on the good nature of TV people to help progress your ideas, and you take them at their word, then I’m afraid you get what you deserve. In my case, that was a big, fat nothing.

Then again, another way to look at it might be that I have actually been quite successful. Of the countless treatments that I’ve developed and “sold” to broadcasters, four of them have gone into production, including a cooking show, a football show, a travel show and a drama. The only drawback is that because they were all stolen, I have no credit, no pay check and no body of work to point to. C’est la vie.

Now, I suddenly find myself on the phone to the same shameless execs who want to talk to me about projects like Nauru, the remote island that I’m scheduled to visit in July with the hope of putting together the island’s first ever football team.

What these execs have going for them – and they know it – is that I’m slightly more shameless than they are. The phone calls have been along the lines of:

“Everybody gets burned at least once.”

“It’s a rite of passage.”

“Come on, no hard feelings.”

It’s my vanity and a need to prove to myself in this industry that has seen me buckle and agree, with all the moral spine of a particularly frightened jellyfish.

At this point I’m sure you’ll understand if I don’t go into detail about my next TV idea, suffice to say that I trust Rocket. I genuinely believe that we could put together something really special that shows football in a whole new light. If the show ever gets made of course.

Will it capture the times in the same way that the first few series of Soccer AM did? Maybe. Probably not. Who really knows? But in a modern world where nothing seems to age particularly well, it seems beside the point.

Football continues to evolve and so does TV. The only thing that remains constant are the people and their motives that control them. It’s taken me years to grasp that. I guess you could say I’ve aged badly.

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