Why Relegated Wolves Were United In Opposition
Wolves were more concerned come the start of the 1965-66 season with Carlisle United and Rotherham United than Manchester United and Leeds United.
But their status as a Second Division club for the first time since the early 1930s did not cost them all their bite.
The Molineux directors, having not long controversially parted company with Stan Cullis, bared their teeth when – in marked contrast to how the game cosies up these days to Sky Sports, TNT, BBC and other broadcasting giants – actually tried to stop a TV programme going out.
We stumbled this week on an early 1970s article which revealed that the John Ireland-led Wolves board had been unhappy with a forthcoming mid-1960s series called United. “The fiction (said Wolves), was too near to the facts of their own recent and troubled history,” the piece read.
Wolves reportedly threatened the BBC with a court injunction after learning that the programme ‘portrayed the changing fortunes of a provincial club which had just sacked its long-established manager and been relegated’. No wonder they thought the story-line was a bit close to home then!
The feature appeared in Book of Football, which was actually an encyclopedia produced by Marshall Cavendish in a long series of weekly magazines.
Part 61/Vol 5, published in 1972 and with Geoff Hurst on the front cover in his Stoke kit, lists none other than Martin Tyler among the publication’s staff writers, with Pat Collins, Ken Jones, Jack Rollin and Dr Percy Young named as contributors.
There is every chance, therefore, that the article was well-informed and it continued: “It was produced in the BBC Midland studio, researched in part with the assistance of Wolves themselves and based, as the scriptwriters admitted, on actual as well as fictional events.”
The programme went ahead but in somewhat watered-down form. The BBC came up with a less revealing, less pointed version that Wolves accepted, so filming got under-way – with the football scenes being shot at Stoke’s Victoria Ground.
United was the brainchild of my good friend Dudley Kernick, the late former Stoke commercial manager whose autobiography I ghost-wrote 40 years ago. He drafted in Jimmy Hill as a technical adviser and the cast included Tony Caunter, John Lyons and George Layton.
Lyons was David Jason’s sidekick in A Touch Of Frost, Caunter appeared in Juliet Bravo and EastEnders and Layton featured in Doctor In The House and Doctor At Large.
United ran for two series, from Ocober, 1965 to March, 1967 – by coincidence, just after Wolves landed in the Second Division and just before they climbed out of it again. In all, 147 half-hour episodes were broadcast, two per week.