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Saint and Greavsie[]

Saint and Greavsie was a cult football chat show on ITV in the late eighties and very early nineties.

In this period standards of broadcasting were somewhat more casual and the show mostly consisted of ‘Greavsie’ (Jimmy Greaves) making ‘Saint’ (Ian St John) laugh with topical football witticisms. Quite often, these jokes referred to Tottenham, Greavsie’s former team; less often, they referred to his famous exclusion from the 1966 World Cup Final team and his subsequent psychological collapse.

Other common themes included ‘Scottish goalies’, a regular target of Greavsie’s satire, e.g.:

E.g.: Greaves: (over highlights) I think even a Scottish goalie would have caught that one, Saint!

Saint: (helpless with laughter, writhing on desk unable to breathe) Stop… stop. Please, Greavsie.

Jokes of this kind have become outdated as it is now widely recognised that not just Scottish goalkeepers but the whole of Scottish football is in a miserable state and these days they normally draw with teams like Lithuania.

The show aired on Saturday mornings and was a popular antidote to the more stuffy Football Focus on Grandstand, especially as the BBC at this time had the rights to no highlights at all, and had not yet worked out how to pad out the time with pointless montages.

Modern times[]

Greavsie has now written a book and is sometimes to be seen doing talks about it, in places like Southend. No-one knows where Saint is, but it’s probably Setanta or that kind of thing.

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