Remembering The Golden Age of Keys and Gray

“Say there was a fire [in your house], and you had to save one thing, what would it be?”

“Myself.”

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– Richard Keys, in conversation with Nicky Crosby.

Before we lived in a world in which one of them was subject to tabloid headlines like “Love Rat Richard Keys’ Young Lover Flaunts Bikini Body At His Wife”, there were two men who served as the imperious demigods of the nation’s live football coverage, and they went by the names of Keys and Gray. Before the sexism storm that rightfully and mercifully destroyed them, they stood above a booming football industry like two overbearing colossi, their marble testes dangling down and scraping luridly across the surface of the sport. On the one hand, there was Gray, a brash Glaswegian and former striker who had played for Aston Villa, Wolves, Everton and Rangers during his bullish eighties heyday. On the other, there was Keys, a sycophantic Sancho Panza and the foil to his partner’s Don Quixotesque charms.

Of course, Andy Gray lacked the romance and chivalry of Don Quixote, and his charms were inherently and distinctly limited. That said, it is undeniable that for a generation of football fans he was one of the most recognisable voices on television, not to mention a trailblazer when it came to the blow-by-blow breakdown of a game. As well as being a pundit and analyst for Sky, he was also a match commentator, and alongside Martin Tyler and Ian Darke produced some seminal moments from the sidelines. There was his visceral roar of “OOOOOH YA BEAUTY” in the aftermath of Steven Gerrard’s long-range strike against Olympiakos in 2004, not to mention his seminal “TAKE A BOW, SON” flourish after Robert Pires’ sublime goal against Aston Villa a couple of years previous. It helped that his commentary was featured on the increasingly popular FIFA series, which brought him into people’s living rooms on a daily basis and made him beloved of thousands of football gamers. His little ticks, familiar tone and admittedly masterful rhetoric came to define the language of football, and as such he can at least claim to have contributed something to the game in his day.

As for Keys’ contribution, that is perhaps a little more nebulous. The anchor of the Sky Sports studio, his main role was to maintain peak chumminess with Gray and any other guests who might appear on Sky’s coverage, often by adding a gratuitous ‘y’ suffix to their names. While he would regularly nettle interviewees with some pedantic or truculent questioning – take his famous 1996 run-in with Ron Atkinson, who was then managing his beloved Coventry City – his ability to be by turns smug and obsequious was a cause of annoyance even among contemporary viewers. Still, whatever their personal foibles, together Keys and Gray fronted Sky Sports at a time when the brand was coming to unprecedented dominance on the global stage.

While Sky Sports is still a broadcasting superpower, there was an era before Setanta, ESPN and BT Sport came along when it was the undisputed master of the football. When Sky successfully bid for the broadcasting rights to the newly formed Premier League in 1992, it marked the start of a partnership that would in one sense revitalise English football, and in another damage it beyond repair. Financially and economically, the national football scene had been on the wane since the eighties, with the hooliganism epidemic and its Thatcherite backlash limiting the sport’s appeal for many. The Premier League rebrand went some way to repairing this damage, and certainly brought new revenues to the sport in terms of sales, marketing and a vast audience of overseas fans.

As the nineties went on and the country began to prosper, the football industry practically exploded. Sky Sports’ marketing strategy was undoubtedly a success, the corporation was awash with money and the value of the Premier League’s television rights went through the metaphorical roof. With the election of New Labour in 1997, England found itself not only with an administration that was keen to have a cosy relationship with football, but also with a dominant corporation in Sky which was more powerful and perhaps closer to government than at any time in its history. It was in this context that Keys and Gray reigned over the Sky Sports studio as lords of their own personal fiefdom, presiding over the football boom and its noughties aftermath from on high.

In terms of shaping football into a form of televised entertainment, it’s impossible to deny that Keys and Gray were effective. Their pioneering approach to Super Sunday and Monday Night Football – no doubt with the help of a committed team behind the scenes – helped to shape many of the platitudes and cliches that persist in the game to this day. When it came to drawing a narrative thread throughout an entire season, they were peerless, cultivating the now timeworn genres of the top-four battle, the relegation dogfight, the title race and so on. They took commonplace ideas from the print media and adapted them deftly to a television format, while also fostering their image as a duo and making themselves seem indispensable to Sky.

Of course, while football was thriving on the television, the consequences of the industry boom were far from universally positive for the average fan. As Sky sold subscriptions at a rate of knots and clubs grew rich on television money, ticket prices soared, brand values became paramount and corporate football culture came to be the norm. This suited Sky down to the ground, naturally, with more and more fans experiencing matchday on television. Keys and Gray were the faces of the transition from stadium to sofa and pub, whether or not they can fairly take any of the blame for that process. Either way, from the early nineties to the winter of 2011, they barked, brayed and bantered their way towards weekend ubiquity on our television screens.

As well we all know, the supposed banter eventually caught up with our dubious heroes, and brought their golden age to an end. Just when the financial crisis, broadcasting competition and the brewing News of the World scandal were shaking up Rupert Murdoch’s business empire, Keys and Gray were themselves rocked by revelations of their sexist behaviour behind the scenes. In audio leaked onto the internet, they could be heard discussing West Ham chairman Karren Brady and assistant referee Sian Massey in plainly chauvinist terms, while a video also showed Gray asking co-presenter Charlotte Jackson to tuck a microphone pack down his trousers. Several years later, older footage from the early noughties showed Keys and Gray targeting a clearly uncomfortable Clare Tomlinson with chants of “get your tits out”, but the two pundits had long ago lost their positions and slunk off to work in the Middle East.

When the controversy broke and the allegations came to light, Gray was the first to go, sacked by Sky Sports owing to his “unacceptable and offensive behaviour.” Keys resigned the very next day, though had he not jumped of his own accord he would almost certainly have been pushed. The whole world knows what happened next, with Keys uttering the words “prehistoric banter” and hence ruining both banter and prehistory for everyone. Unfortunately, prehistory remains deeply unfashionable, even if banter has been somewhat rehabilitated by the hundreds of resultant Richard Keys Vines and employees of our own venerable publication.

While Keys has continued to be absolutely excruciating in the time since, Gray has kept a relatively low profile while working for beIN Sports in Qatar, even briefly flirting with rehabilitation when he commentated on a couple of matches for BT Sport in 2014. Were anyone inclined to reintegrate Keys into society, they would have to contend with his complete lack of self-awareness on Twitter, his timeless stance that “it was just banter” and a blog which would make Alan Partridge look like René Descartes in particularly contemplative mood. On top of all that, none of us have forgotten the time he gave fellow beIN Sports presenter Nicky Crosby a tour of his house in Doha, showing off his replica phone box, Union Jack mirror and detailed model of the Titanic, the story of which we are reliably informed is “a fascinating tale.”

“There’s not much in my life except that laptop and a set of golf sticks that’s very necessary really,” Keys says in wistful fashion, in a moment which would be sort of affecting were it not then followed by a telling exchange. Despite having waxed lyrical about his love of his dogs, when asked off the cuff what he would rescue from a house fire he replies, without hesitation, that he would save himself. While having been involved in a deeply unpleasant sexism scandal will inevitably haunt Keys for the rest of his career, there is still a certain pathos to his downfall which might kindle a flicker of compassion amongst those who indulged him during his prime. Sadly, Keys tends to immediately snuff this out with some fresh show of petty egotism, and so for the majority of the public reserves of sympathy seem to have run dry.

When we look back on the golden age of Keys and Gray in hindsight, we surely see two broadcasting colossi who were brought down by their monumental egos. While their horrible attitude towards women was the decisive factor in their dismissals, the fact that they felt emboldened enough to be so openly chauvinistic says pretty much everything we need to know. Riding high on the wave of popularity which carried the football industry financially ever upwards, they were massively swelled with their own self-regard and behaved in a shameless manner accordingly. As such, they were fitting icons of the Sky Sports era, when BSkyB had a footballing monopoly and their money made the game ever more bold.

Though there were doubtlessly those who adored Keys and Gray in those halcyon days of Premier League football – and perhaps some who still hold a flame for their blokey and latently crass approach – most have had to come to terms with the idea that their reign was never truly a golden one. Looking back now, their infamous giggling fit during their analysis of the 1998 Women’s FA Cup Final feels like another indictment of their boorishness, no matter the poor quality of the game. It’s hard not to wonder just how long they got away with incidents similar to those which ultimately finished them, and how many colleagues suffered them quietly over the years. They were two of the most powerful men in punditry, and for a long time they no doubt got their own way.

In a world where one of them is tabloid fodder and the other is keeping a low profile in Qatar, Keys and Gray still have some influence. It has little to do with their current work in Doha, and far more to do with the legacy they have left behind. They were, undeniably, a formative influence on Sky Sports’ television coverage, which still serves as the medium through which millions of supporters watch football. They are, nevertheless, a warning from history, and a reminder to the television personalities of the present not to become blinkered and deluded by fame.

@W_F_Magee