Bickerstaff set rules for sports talk on radio

OBITUARY

Get that into ya: The trailblazer of sports talk on radio in New Zealand, Tim 'Punch a Pom A Day' Bickerstaff.

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TIM BICKERSTAFF didn't so much blaze a trail in sports talk on radio in New Zealand as dynamite the landscape, and change it forever.

The 67-year-old broadcaster's funeral was in Auckland yesterday. He was found dead in his Whitianga home last Saturday.

Bickerstaff came from a background in the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation of the 1960s, when reporters were called "officers" and the style was the BBC crossed with a conservative insurance office.

It was never going to suit his volcanic personality, and when he came back from a stint on radio in Melbourne in the 1960s he was ready for something very different.

At the NZBC his most memorable moment was the time during the Saturday night television news when the camera panned down to reveal he was reading results directly from the 8 O'Clock sports newspaper.

But at the start of the 1970s he found his niche, working on an afternoon sports show with Geoff Sinclair, with the newly-formed Radio i.

It was an instant hit, and went world wide, when, in the wake of All Blacks prop Keith Murdoch being sent home from Wales, Bickerstaff drove a "Punch a Pom A Day" campaign.

Even in 1972 it was politically incorrect, and Bickerstaff's mastery of on-air outrage was demonstrated when the furore had almost died down.

An English woman rang, said she couldn't believe Tim really meant it, and then started to cry.

In a 1982 interview he told me he looked at the studio clock, waited until 60 agonising seconds of sobbing had passed, and then snapped, "Stop blubbering you silly Pommie cow."

Ten years later he roared with laughter. "Kept it going another six weeks mate."

The inner rogue was always near the surface with Tim. In the same '82 interview he also revealed that a quiz he had run, that riveted Auckland, where a former Aussie boxer called Reg Fletcher had beaten all comers, night after night, with his astonishing knowledge of sports trivia, was actually faked. "Reg was only so good," Tim said, "because he had all the answers in front of him."

While the rorts and scandals made the best anecdotes, Bickerstaff was not just prepared to push boundaries. He was a brilliant broadcaster.

For several years I had the pleasure of talking for 20 minutes every week with him when he moved to Radio Pacific, and to this day I have never worked with a sharper mind, or a more attentive listener.

If there was sadness to the Bickerstaff story it was that he was so controversial in the 1970s that he became virtually an isolated prisoner of his own success, at one stage in his life he was unhappy about going out in public for fear of abuse or even assault.

There had never been a broadcaster like Tim Bickerstaff before he hit his stride, and nobody has matched him since.

- © Fairfax NZ News