Programmes! Programmes! – Football and Life from Wartime to Lockdown, by Cliff Hague, published by Pitch Publishing, Price: £16.99
FOR those of us with a love of football programmes, these are worrying times.
Clubs at varying levels, including some in the Football League, are no longer printing programmes. It could be that there’s falling demand, they are too time intensive to put together and it is now simpler and quicker to produce them digitally, but it’s still something many of us will miss when we go to a game.
And it’s also a souvenir, a memento of a game, good or bad, that we can keep, albeit it may end up in a dusty pile before too long.
With all that in mind, Programmes! Programmes! has come out at just the right time. Cliff Hague’s book covers matchday magazines over a period of decades and explores how they have changed and developed.
It has been lovingly put together and is a good mix with anecdotes, stories, spotlights and, not surprisingly, some covers to look at.
As Hague says, the book is inspired by football, but also changing times.
“Football programmes carry personal memories but are also historical objects, laden with stories about their place and time,” he writes. “So this book aims to tease out some of those memories and stories, and share them with readers who have experienced the excitement of hearing the programmes sellers’ cries of ‘Programmes! Programmes!’, the clank of the turnstile, and then getting that awe-inspiring first view of the pitch.”
This is a comprehensive book about football programmes that does them justice at a pivotal moment.
Rating out of 10: 8
