“The city is looking as resplendent as ever,” said Mark Pougatch, as a camera panned across grey skies and a rather muddy-looking Seine, before discovering the ITV presenter and his guests on a roof overlooking the Île Saint-Louis. The sheets of paper on their clipboards did a Mexican wave in the wind.
Still, if you’re entrenched in a decades-long broadcast war with the BBC, you’ve got to take risks, and to go by first impressions it was paying off. The terrace was furnished with topiary trees and an equally groomed Emmanuel Petit and framed by a backdrop of Notre Dame. The BBC, meanwhile, seemed to have brought an old Match of the Day set over on the Eurostar. Instead of Notre Dame, they had la Tour Eiffel, although that could have been just a projection – perhaps they were still in Salford, after all.
Of course, when it comes to football studios, the big money is in the table, the sine qua non of any pundit gathering. These are lavished with considerable budget by the production team and yet we never see anyone set down on them as much as a cup of tea. The BBC had gone for what looked like a postmodern take on a wobbly stack of crêpes, while ITV designed the base of theirs to replicate Paris’s most famous landmark. This meant that, whenever the camera caught Slaven Bilic straight on, he appeared to have had his legs replaced by the Eiffel Tower.
Pougatch’s crew had first bite of the gateaux on Friday night when France kicked off the tournament against Romania. With the Sorbonne only a short walk away, it was good of Petit – effortlessly outdressing his colleagues in a three-piece suit – to begin the programme by with some suitable Left-Bank philosophising on how the tournament might address France’s current ills. “It won’t solve all of the problems we have, socially, economically,” he mused, “but we’ll try to forget, at least for one month, our problems.’
Covering the opening game means you also get the ceremony, in this case a colourful and brief affair that involved dancers can-canning their way around a parterre garden with a commitment that would have heartened even the country’s most famous high kicker, Eric Cantona. Clive Tyldesley spoke with suspicious authority on the Bluebell Girls of the Lido Cabaret, David Guetta pretended to fiddle with dials on a mixing desk, and a few unlucky women were dressed up as giant pairs of lips. (Note to costume designers – not all sexy things make sexy costumes.)
The ITV set really came into its own as dusk fell, and both the city and Lee Dixon glowed a lamplit orange. At one stage Pougatch threw to their roving reporter at the official fan park: former Wimbledon champion Marion Bartoli, dressed in blue and white polka dots, clutched a microphone like a teenager karaoke-ing into a hairbrush. Her breathless double act with Louis Saha seemed to be an audition for a new career as a YouTube vlogger. “I’m like a kid, like, I don’t know, like a … fan!” burbled Saha, as the pair bounced around chanting “Allez les Bleus” until the ITV editors mercifully left them, and never returned.
If the Beeb had less flashy surroundings, they made it up for it with team spirit. The ever-adorable Dan Walker oversaw events from Paris on Saturdaywith that repressed grin that suggests he still knows just how lucky he is, and down in Bordeaux John Hartson was wearing a similar expression as he welcomed Wales to their first ever European Championship. Thierry Henry, meanwhile, revealed that he had discovered the correct way to pronounce “Payet” (you pronounce the ‘t’, apparently) by phoning said player the night before to ask him.
The atmosphere was one of pure warmth, mirrored in the tunnel at the Stade Bollaert-Delelis, where the Albanian and Switzerland players greeted each other with hugs before the match. And there was an equally heartening moment in the second half of that game, when confusion in the editing suite sent us to a brief snatch of Walker, sitting in his darkened studio, watching the game alone. On the table in front of him were several bags of Maltesers, a paper cup and a mess of papers. At long last, the myth of the non-functioning table had been laid to rest. Now we’re just waiting to find out what happens to Pougatch and Bilic when it rains.
