LOOK SHARPE: When Miss World Worked In A Betting Shop

Sports betting PR legend GRAHAM SHARPE brings you his latest ‘LOOK SHARPE’ column…

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HAVING started my career as a wannabe journalist on a local newspaper, which probably resulted in three years of my most influential work (much of which involved stories beginning: ‘Rumours that………were denied this week’!) – I’ve steadfastly remained a voracious reader of papers, whether local, weekly, daily, specialist – but the main attraction of such ‘rags’, as they were affectionately known, for me is that they ARE actually news PAPERS- I can’t really be doing with their online versions, I’m too signed in to the actual hard copy versions.

Which means that I do spend a great deal of time reading the ones I regularly buy, or pick up as freebies. My daily routine during the week is to stroll down to the paper shop, where I will purchase my chosen ones, whilst collecting en route free copies of the Metro and City AM papers from the local railway station.

And it always pleasantly surprises me how frequently I come across stories and snippets of news in these organs which are related to betting and racing or similarly themed matters. Like, for example, the recent one informing readers that prior to the sad death of the late Queen, ‘a £1 win bet on each of her runners during the last five flat seasons of her reign resulted in a loss of £121.10.’ Good to know that her flunkies and closest advisors were terrible tipsters.

Also, in the last couple of weeks, I stumbled across a headline in the financial paper, City AM, which gave me pause for thought, reading: ‘Allwyn: We want to get more young people playing the National Lottery.’ Now, the ‘Allwyn’ mentioned is the company now responsible for running the National Lottery. Clever name, implying, of course, that ‘all’ who play ‘wyn’, or, of course, win. Which is, of course, misleading in itself.

However, the story here involved Andria Vidler, chief exec of the company declaring that the NL has ‘aged’ on the basis that it now has an older demographic of, ahem, ‘players’, and that it needs ‘a look at how to make the Lottery more engaging.’ This apparently will happen, writes the story’s author, Jess Jones if it can ‘rejuvenate its ageing demographic’ by drawing in ‘younger crowds.’

Imagine if that headline had read ‘Bookies want to get more young people betting in their shops’. Imagine the outrage that would probably cause.

Around a day or so later, in the daily Metro paper, I read a story which immediately took my mind back to the dim and distant past, when one of my roles was chaperoning glamorous personalities performing the duty of official betting shop openings. One of which was the leading Sun newspaper ‘Page Three Girl’ of the time, a probably late- teenage Samantha Fox who was scheduled to do the honours for a brand new branch of my then company somewhere in, I think, north London.

The headline over this recent story was ‘P3 Sam Fox fined for drunken jet bust-up.’ Quite a clever, punny eye-catcher.

I won’t go into more detail about that story, but I did begin to recall our meeting back in the day, which saw a massive crowd of people – the large majority of which were almost certainly too young to enter a betting shop – turning up without the slightest awareness of what a yankee, or an each-way double might be – but just wanting to talk to, touch, or have their photo taken with Ms Fox. However, things rapidly spiralled out of control and she, gently propelled by myself, ended up having to leg it down the road rapidly, to escape the clutches of her more enthusiastic fans. We managed to outrun them and found a quiet local shop in which to enjoy a cuppa.

Oddly enough, not that long afterwards, I accompanied a colleague of Sam’s, Maria Whittaker (now known as Maria Tafari, apparently) to another of our shop openings, which went off in a far more relaxed manner, and where she was happy to have her photo taken with the shop staff – oh, and myself – and was treated rather less, er, physcially, than poor Sam – who, I note, was fined £1000 as a result of the recent court appearance over the ‘drunken bust-up’ – which may have been not a huge amount more than she earned for opening the betting shop. Nice to know what goes around comes around…..

Much though I enjoyed meeting both of these charming ladies, I must admit that I did slightly envy my colleague, the urbane Ken Gillie, who landed the job of escorting the REIGNING Miss World, the South African, Anneline Kriel, when she opened a new betting shop in his native Hull – not only that, she enjoyed a spell marking up odds on the in-shop board for that season’s Rugby League Cup competition!

By the way, if you remember that name as well as I do, do you also remember in which year she was crowned Miss World? Well, brace yourself – it was 1974!

Almost as much of a throng of spectators desperate to see and react with the star in question had gathered when I found myself at another shop opening – which was to be carried out by an equine hero – one of the all-time greats – Red Rum. The triple Grand National winner was outside of the shop holding court when a lady sidled up to me and asked ‘Will you give this to Rummy for me, please?’ before holding out a large birthday cake, adorned with the name of the horse spelled out in some kind of icing sugar or similar.

‘Of course, thank you very much indeed’, I responded, before taking the cake into the shop and handing it over to the staff – after all, horses are not known for their love of delicious cake – and, yes, memories are hazy, but they MIGHT just have offered me a slice!

And finally, this was voted third in a ‘Top 5 Jokes’ feature in a daily newspaper. Judge for yourself. It was told by one Alex Kitson: ‘Ate horse at a restaurant once – wasn’t great. Starter was all right but the mane was dreadful.’

I’ll get my coat……..

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Views of authors do not necessarily represent views of Star Sports Bookmakers.

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