Robert Colston (27 June 1928 – 24 March 2013) was a broadcaster who was famous in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

as the voice of the football results on

ITV ITV or iTV may refer to: ITV *Independent Television (ITV), a British television network, consisting of: ** ITV (TV network), a free-to-air national commercial television network covering the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islan ...

's various Saturday afternoon football results programmes for 27 years between 1972 and 1999. Colston joined '' World of Sport'' in 1972 and read out the football results until the programme was cancelled in 1985. He continued to read the results as ITV broadcast the football scores in a stand-alone programme called ''Results Service'' which ran until 1992. The results were then featured during the Saturday teatime

ITV News ITV News is the branding of news programmes on the British television network ITV. ITV has a long tradition of television news. Independent Television News (ITN) was founded to provide news bulletins for the network in 1955, and has since conti ...

bulletin which Colston did until 1999. He made brief appearances on

Sky Sports Sky Sports is a group of British subscription sports channels operated by the satellite pay television company Sky Group (a division of Comcast), and is the dominant subscription television sports brand in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It ...

reading out the football results on '' Soccer Saturday'' during the 2000–01 season. Whilst reading the results, Colston inflected his voice to imply the result of a match simply through his

sonorous A sonority hierarchy or sonority scale is a hierarchical ranking of speech sounds (or phones). Sonority is loosely defined as the loudness of speech sounds relative to other sounds of the same pitch, length and stress, therefore sonority is ofte ...

intonation of the home team's score. Unlike Len Martin, who surpassed his

longevity The word " longevity" is sometimes used as a synonym for "life expectancy" in demography. However, the term ''longevity'' is sometimes meant to refer only to especially long-lived members of a population, whereas ''life expectancy'' is always d ...

on the BBC's rival programme ''

Grandstand A grandstand is a normally permanent structure for seating spectators. This includes both auto racing and horse racing. The grandstand is in essence like a single section of a stadium, but differs from a stadium in that it does not wrap a ...

'' from its inception in 1958 until his death in 1995, Colston would use abbreviations for some teams such as " Spurs" which would allow him to read the results more quickly than Martin.

References

1928 births 2013 deaths British sports broadcasters {{UK-bcast-stub