Soccer AM hosts Helen and Tim reunite for a smash-hit Mail podcast

One could argue it is the reunion of the decade: a coming together of two much-loved names from the 1990s who went their separate ways, leaving vast numbers yearning for their inimitable entertainment style.

No, not those Mancunian brothers. We’re talking about Helen Chamberlain and Tim Lovejoy, former presenters of cult Saturday sports show, Soccer AM, who are back to bring you the Mail’s sparkling new football podcast Soccer A-Z.

Their reunion follows hard on the news that the Gallagher brothers will tour next year, though Tim, 56, jokes that he and Helen, 57, decided to get back together first: ‘I think Oasis found out and thought “we’ll have a bit of that”.’

Either way, the news will be every bit as welcome to football fans as the return of Oasis for Britpop lovers – and indeed possibly Noel Gallagher himself, given he was once a show guest.

In the 90s, football and pop culture were part of the same heady, glamorous cultural mix. ‘We arrived and so did Britpop – this huge explosion on the music scene. We were right there with it as the excitement was happening,’ says Tim.

For the uninitiated, Lovejoy and Chamberlain were two of the long-running hosts on Soccer AM, a Sky Sports show which aired between 1994 and last year. Tim was a presenter between 1996 and 2007 and Helen for an astonishing 22 years, until 2017.

Alongside a cast of colourful sidekicks – who will also feature on Soccer A-Z – the duo took an irreverent look at the beautiful game.

‘It’s mad isn’t it?’ muses Helen, known affectionately as Hells Bells by her fans. ‘You’d think you get ten blokes trying to kick a ball into one hole and ten of them trying to kick the ball in the other hole would mean at some point people would say, “I think we’ve talked about everything”. But it never happened.’

‘I hate to break it to you, Helen, but football’s 11 a side, not 10,’ interjects Tim, leading to an immediate protest from his sidekick that he knows all too well she wasn’t including the goalkeeper.

‘He always does this,’ she says, raising her eyebrows.

The pair have come straight from recording the podcast’s first episode and, given this general air of mutual mickey-taking, it’s safe to say the chemistry of yesteryear has not gone away. They’ve always remained friends, although Tim admits that when the idea of doing a modern podcast take on Soccer AM came up, his initial instinct was to say no.

‘The period I did with Helen was so loved I didn’t want to tarnish it – I wanted it to remain in everybody’s memory,’ he admits. ‘But then I realised we could do something new as well as reminiscing and have a lot of fun too.’

They are both football mad. Growing up in London, Tim’s first memory is watching Chelsea with his father, grandfather and brother, and he quickly graduated from watching football to playing it. ‘I was always with a football when I was a kid,’ he recalls.

At the family home in Somerset, meanwhile, it was Helen’s mum who was the passionate fan. Helen can still recall hearing her mum swear out loud for the first time when someone tackled Liverpool legend Ian Rush in a European Cup match. ‘She hissed “you b*stard”, at the telly and I was so shocked I went to bed,’ she recalls. ‘Mum taught me the offside rule as well. I think it was bigger for her than the ­conversation about where babies came from.’

Even so, neither’s career path seemed destined to end up revolving around football – or in Helen’s case, even in entertainment. She was working at Chessington World of Adventures on the outskirts of London, when her natural skill as an entertainer – showcased during a presentation about sealions – was spotted by a producer from the American-owned children’s TV channel Nickelodeon.

She was poached from there to join the nascent Soccer AM, which Helen says was little more, initially, than a ‘bunged together’ format chatting about anything from newspaper match reviews to warnings of roadworks on the way to games.

Tim had begun his TV career in music, with MTV, before working as a researcher then producer on Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast. He got a job on Soccer AM after writing to the producers asking for work as ‘no one else on Big Breakfast really liked talking about football’.

Helen confides that Tim’s arrival on the show in 1996 did not seem like good news for her. ‘I thought I was going to get fired because all I did was stuff like “there are cones on the M8”, but then they explained they wanted to bring a cup final vibe to every single show and I got really, really excited.’

As Tim reminds us, football was then emerging from a grim decade characterised by the twin horrors of hooliganism and stadium disasters, notably the 1985 stadium fire at Bradford which killed 56 people, the Heysel stadium disaster in which 39 people died in the same year and the 1989 Hillsborough catastrophe, which ultimately killed 97. ‘From the early 90s it started to change – you got all-seater stadiums and Sky Sports launched in 1991 and it felt like a bit of a rebirth.’

And there, as it happened, was Soccer AM, initially what Tim calls a ‘hidden little thing’ with a tiny subscriber audience on Sky, which over time grew into must-see viewing. ‘Footballers like Rio Ferdinand, Frank Lampard and Joe Cole started to come on.

‘Then we got the celebrity fans – Noel Gallagher and Ray Winstone. The rock band Kasabian came on and said it was their favourite show.

‘I think people watched us grow and felt part of it,’ says Tim. Helen has particularly fond memories of ebullient actor Brian Blessed, now 87, bursting through the door and bellowing for six minutes non-stop, reeling off the names of the 1968 Manchester United European Cup-winning squad and negating the need for their meticulously researched questions.

‘We loved every single second,’ Helen laughs. ‘We instantly rebooked him.’ In time, the duo themselves became almost as loved in football fan circles as the players. ‘When I was out and about at football matches, people would clamber over seats to come and say hello, like they knew me,’ Helen says.

Tim, now a father of three cringes when reminded that, in 2009, he was voted the UK’s 49th most eligible bachelor. ‘Was it out of 50?’ asks Helen with a grin.

Thirty years ago, women commentators were a rarity and she smiles as she recalls how people frequently asked her if her dad played football. ‘They assumed I couldn’t independently like football and get a job on TV talking about it,’ she laughs. ‘At the time there were a few women floating around football whose dads played – people like Kelly Cates, Kenny Dalglish’s daughter, and Gabby Logan, Terry Yorath’s daughter, so they just assumed I was in a similar mould.’

She used to joke that the Watford goalkeeper Alec Chamberlain was her father, despite the fact he was only three years older than her. ‘Tim used to join in with that. Whenever Alec Chamberlain was mentioned, he’d say “Helen’s dad”,’ she laughs. ‘Then I met Alec one day and he said that week in, week out kids used to come up to him and say “you’re Helen Chamberlain’s dad”. He did see the funny side.’

This good-natured banter doesn’t mean Helen isn’t fully aware of the way some men viewed – and still view – women who dare to muscle in on ‘their’ game. ‘On one occasion I was in a nightclub talking to a Chelsea player and another guy pitched up and tried to join in,’ she recalls. ‘I asked him who he supported and when he said “Preston North End” I mentioned the then infamous plastic pitch they’d introduced.

‘He literally stuck his hand in my face palm out [she makes the gesture] and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t have a conversation with a woman about football”. It stayed with me, but it was the one and only time.’

Sadly, she believes that despite appearances, that rich seam of sexism in sport is still present.

‘Especially on social media,’ she says. ‘There’s still some, I’m going to say hatred, because it is, it’s just nasty stuff. People saying “what is this woman doing on my TV talking about football?”.

‘And everybody just accepts that as okay, but if you took the word woman out of that and replaced it with any other protected category, you would be reported and removed from the platform.’

Other things have changed dramatically in football though, a game that has grown in every way possible, from the size of the squads to the number of noughts on the end of players’ salaries.

‘Back when we started, there were 11 players with a couple of subs,’ says Tim. ‘Now Chelsea have got something like 46 players. It’s unbelievable how many players’ names you have to learn.’

Premier League footballers are frequently paid more in a week than the average Joe earns over many years, although Helen in particular has no time for those who complain about that.

‘The salaries aren’t my concern – it’s not the footballers’ fault,’ she says. ‘I’m more irritated by people who will have a go at a footballer who has not performed at his best and who will always bring up how much he is paid. Tim made a really good point years ago, which is that nobody ever does this with actors like Tom Cruise who are paid just as much.’

That doesn’t mean she’s not saddened by some of the changes the megabucks have brought with them. ‘The reality is unless you have oil baron money, you cannot win the Premier League,’ she says, an assertion that leads to a heated discussion about Leicester City’s shock win in 2015-2016. This, of course, is exactly what fans will be tuning in for. ‘We actually didn’t have an argument when we were recording just now, but it won’t take long,’ says Helen. ‘There was something, actually,’ interjects Tim. ‘Helen was basically telling us that she could be a pro golfer’ (she insists she really didn’t).

Helen’s hand/eye co-ordination must be something to be reckoned with, though, given that she once beat former World No1 Champion Eric Bristow at darts – technically a game called Darts Cricket – while filming at a tournament in Blackpool. ‘Eric was fuming because he’d just been legitimately beaten by me and we were filming it as well. I did about 58 laps of the social club where we were filming,’ she grins.

She also plays a mean game of poker, finishing second in a 2005 Poker Million tournament and winning £305,000, which she spent on a fancy car and invested in racehorses.

For all that, today Helen insists she’s happiest at home on her six-acre smallholding with her rescue animals, which include five dogs, two pigs, a donkey, a miniature Shetland, nine sheep, a llama, an alpaca and ten rheas (a type of ostrich), alongside assorted chickens, ducks, geese, peacocks and cockatiels.

‘I just think Helen’s nuts, but I’m used to it,’ says Tim. ‘She turned up to Soccer AM once with a swan in her car.’

It turns out the swan in question had been rescued by Helen from the M25 as she made her way to the studio.

‘All the cars had stopped and when I got to the front of the queue, it was because of a swan. Because I keep geese I thought, “I can get that”. So I got out the car and grabbed it, chucked the swan in the car and drove off.’

‘She said she rescued it. We think she just stole it,’ says Tim.

And they’re off again – which is just how we like it.