47-yeaar career at the BBC, Nicholas Witchell has covered a string of major events. The list includes the deaths of Queen Elizabeth and Diana, Princess of Wales, the Falklands and Gulf Wars, Lockerbie and Zeebrugge. On Christmas Eve 1983, it was his solemn duty to inform the nation of something less seismic: the final score in the Division Three fixture between Brentford and Wimbledon.
The 5pm news, tucked away between The Dukes of Hazzard and Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, ended with a report from Griffin Park. The BBC had sent a crew to west London because it was the only professional game played in England. And though Leeds met Manchester United in the Premier League on 24 December 1995, it remains the last Football League fixture to be played on Christmas Eve.
Brentford had originally planned something even more headline-grabbing: the first Football League game on Christmas Day since 1965. It was the brainchild of their innovative chairman, Martin Lange. “Brentford were having a curiously bad season, near the bottom of the league and struggling for crowds,” says Rob Jex, a Brentford historian. “They were almost £500,000 in debt, which was big for a club of our size, so they were looking for a gimmick to get more fans in, even on a one-off basis. It was a desperate time financially, with setback after setback, and Martin Lange was trying anything to stabilise the club and keep it solvent.”
Related: The Football Daily Christmas Awards 2023
Lange, a Brentford fan from the age of five, was a popular, personable chairman who made his money in property. In 1985 he sold one of the Ferraris in his collection so that the club could buy the striker Robbie Cooke for £25,000. Last month, a similar car sold at auction for £42m. “Brentford played regularly on Christmas Day from 1906 to 1958 and Martin Lange may have been at some of those games,” says Jonathan Burchill, author of A Pub on Each Corner. “The idea that you could perhaps get a 10,000 crowd would have fired his imagination. He was always trying to do something different.”
