David Coleman: Sports broadcaster, who brought a fine eye & immense memory to the greatest on-field events

David Coleman, who has died aged 87, was the face and voice of BBC Television sport for 40 years, the anchorman for the flagship Grandstand programme on Saturday afternoons and later the affable host of the popular quiz A Question Of Sport.

Until retiring in 2000 he had also covered every football World Cup since Sweden hosted it in 1958, and all 11 Olympic Games since 1960, as well as presenting Grandstand and Sportsnight With Coleman for a total of 14 years.

With his prodigious memory, no-nonsense manner, total command of his brief and infectious and unfailing enthusiasm, Coleman came to define BBC sport as a world-class brand.

Ever the critical observer, he was always more than a detached bystander and never flinched from barking out blunt and often controversial opinions about the sporting — and occasionally unsporting — spectacle unfolding before him.

In the brawling 1962 football World Cup encounter between Chile and Italy, for example, which became known as the Battle of Santiago, the first foul came in 12 seconds, and the first sending off came after only eight minutes.

"The most stupid, appalling, disgusting and disgraceful exhibition of football, possibly in the history of the game," was Coleman's indignant on-air verdict. But it was as a commentator on spectacular sporting endeavours that he made his mark, his "garrulous gurgle" (as The Daily Telegraph once put it) adding presence to the big occasion.

He seized the commentator's art from the deferential, plummy-voiced, mustachioed phrase-makers of old on behalf of the modern Everyman in the crowd, flat northern vowels and all.

"He is the cloth-cap supporter standing on the terrace," said his long-time producer, Alec Weeks. Then there was his incredible eye for the action itself. In athletics, that meant separating out a squad of sprinters and calling the result in less time than it takes to read this paragraph.

"His race-reading of successive Olympic 100 metres finals - identifying eight men tearing straight at him in a 10 second blur - was," agreed The Guardian's Frank Keating, "a party-piece of splendour".

When Ann Packer won the 800 metres final at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Coleman's voice characteristically cracked with emotion as she crossed the line.

In the supercharged excitement of David Hemery's 400 metres hurdle race at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, Coleman was said to have achieved the remarkable machine-gun delivery rate of 200 words per minute.

As Hemery himself put it: "His voice actually engenders some of the adrenalin that people identify with, and he can create such a spirit of excitement that it helps people to live in the moment."

To Coleman's displeasure, his faintly adenoidal tones, chirpy studio presence (which failed to mask an air of tension as he tried to concentrate on what his producer was shouting in his earpiece) and sometimes manically banal observations were so much imitated that he became something of a figure of fun.

He was mercilessly sent up in Spitting Image where the puppet Coleman fidgeted in his chair, fiddled with his earpiece and kept saying: "Er… er… " and "…quite remarkable!" The satirical magazine Private Eye coined the neologism "Colemanballs" as a generic term for his and other commentators' gaffes and unfortunate on-air turns of phrase.

The most celebrated slip ascribed to Coleman was the observation that [the Cuban runner] "Juanjareno opens his legs and shows his class" - although in fact this was uttered by the athletics commentator Ron Pickering.

When Hemery won a gold medal in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics it was Coleman who yelled into the microphone "…and who cares who's third?"

In fact it was another Briton, John Sherwood, who had won the bronze. Sherwood was not happy, but eventually forgave Coleman. Another gaffe that haunted Coleman was calling the hole-in-the-heart footballer Asa Hartford "a wholehearted player".

Yet another was his comment: "Forest are having a bad run - they've lost six matches without winning." Although Coleman spread his talents and sporting knowledge thinly - many found the annual exposure at the Grand National of his profound ignorance of racing especially irritating - he was, for all the sneers, a highly professional broadcaster.

Renowned for his impatience and explosive temper with people less fastidious than himself, Coleman always managed to remain calm - and even bland - on screen.

He made his name on Grandstand, where his ad libs and mastery of football trivia as he stood alongside the teleprinter with the football results coming in revealed remarkably acute and detailed research.

But he became frustrated by being always studio-bound and yearned for a new challenge. Even so, in 1967, after repeated wooing by ITV, he signed a new seven-year BBC contract at pounds 10,000 a year, making him the highest-paid broadcaster in television sport.

Coleman's epic hour in journalism came in 1972 with his prolonged and sombre vigil, working off just one distant fixed camera, during the unfolding of the Munich Olympics atrocity.

He had gone to bed at 5am after a drink or two and was woken four hours later to be told that Black September terrorists had taken Israeli athletes hostage in the Olympic Village.

For the next two days, as nine Israeli hostages were murdered, Coleman continued to broadcast single-handedly and live from the Munich studio in a 30-hour tour de force - at one stage he interviewed an Israeli weightlifter who, still in his pyjamas, had escaped through a downstairs window.

Drawing on his early journalistic training, Coleman demonstrated a grasp of drama and detail that could turn in a moment into impeccable, measured, sensitive reportage. The episode took its toll on him.

"I didn't find it very easy to get restarted," he reflected. "The thought of shouting about a race as if it mattered at all so soon after this was too much."

The following year he left the BBC and moved with his family to Barbados to consider offers from several American broadcast networks, but was back five months later, saying he had decided to stay.

On his return he found that Frank Bough - with whom his relations were never cordial - had replaced him in the Grandstand presenter's chair; Sportsnight, meanwhile, had been taken over by Harry Carpenter.

Coleman sued the BBC, saying he was not being given enough top sports to cover, and once the dispute had been "amicably" settled became a specialist commentator on track events in athletics and on football.

He then further secured his mainstream popularity as presenter of the relentlessly good-humoured A Question of Sport, the quiz programme that first ran for a record 18 years from 1979.

David Robert Coleman was born on April 26 1926 at Alderley Edge, Cheshire, and educated at Stockport Grammar School. Having heard a radio commentary from the 1936 Berlin Olympics when he was 10, the young man was determined to be a 1,500m gold medallist and in 1949 became the only non-international to win the famous Manchester Mile.

But when a hamstring injury put an end to his athletic ambitions, he turned to journalism. During his National Service as a PE instructor with the Royal Corps of Signals, Coleman worked on the Army newspaper Union Jack, and on his discharge joined Kemsley Newspapers.

He worked as a cub reporter on the Stockport Express, earning 15 shillings a week. Covering Stockport County reserves for the paper, he was once recruited to make up the numbers when they were a man short. Later he admitted that the Fourth Division club's result was always the first he looked for on the chattering Grandstand teleprinter.

At 22 he took over the Cheshire County Press as editor - one of the youngest in the country. On one occasion in the editor's chair he was assaulted by an irate councillor, stories of whose professional malpractice he had run in the paper.

In 1953 he started freelance radio work in Manchester and the following year joined the BBC in Birmingham as a news assistant. Having made his first television broadcast on Sportsview in May 1954 on the day Roger Bannister became the first runner to break the four-minute mile, Coleman was appointed sports editor, Midland Region, in November 1955.

After the editor of Sportsview, Paul Fox, had seen him interview the footballer Danny Blanchflower on regional television, Coleman transferred to London. In 1958 the BBC's Head of Sport, Peter Dimmock, offered Coleman the frontman's job on the new sports magazine programme, Grandstand.

"It was Grandstand that showed how skilled and flexible he was on screen," Fox recalled. "He was able to listen to the producer's talkback in his ear, walk across the studio talking sense and then either lead into the next event or sight-read the football results. It was the master at work and it was a joy to watch him."

Coleman became the BBC's lead commentator on Match of the Day, which had become a Saturday night institution since first being broadcast in 1964.

Because the role took him all over the country, the BBC laid on a four-seater aircraft to fly him to and from his home in Buckinghamshire to the various fixtures, a weekly regime that instilled in him a fear of flying.

By 1968 the BBC had started to build its sports programmes around him, making him the star of the midweek Sportsnight With Coleman magazine show.

At the Mexico Olympics of that year, Coleman caused a stir when a tape was leaked of his intemperate outburst against his hapless director during a camera rehearsal.

"Jonathan, Jonathan, keep it simple," Coleman was heard to exclaim. "You've got a bloody zoom there, and a camera that's racing all over the bloody studio. I mean, Christ Almighty, you'd do better on one camera, for God's sake.

"Get into your original position… I mean, don't try and be bloody clever… Keep your camera still now… bloody chattering all the way through it. Get your bloody finger out… I've never seen such a bloody carnival in my life. Right." [Cues jaunty music].

In 1971, when Kenneth Wolstenholme left the BBC after failing to agree the terms of a new contract, Coleman took over as chief football commentator. As a leading member of the BBC team, Coleman shared the International Olympic Committee's Golden Rings Award for the best television broadcaster at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

He was also the recipient of the judges' award for sport at the 1996 Royal Television Society awards. He was appointed OBE in 1992. In 2000, the year he retired, Coleman was invested into the Olympic Order, the highest honour of the Olympic movement, the first broadcaster or journalist to be so honoured.

"Without doubt, the finest broadcaster the world of sport will ever know," was the verdict of his producer, Alec Weeks. In a poll for The Daily Telegraph in 1996, readers named Coleman as sport's greatest commentator.

"In the end," Coleman himself modestly noted, "I'm just a journalist. That's what it says on my passport." David Coleman is survived by his wife, Barbara, and their six children.

David Coleman, born April 26 1926, died December 21 2013