Coleman send-off a Beeb bloomer

It is a mocking irony that Britain's surviving patriarch of sports broadcasting - uniquely identifiable for the gurglingly intense cadence with which his voice urgently engaged the generations for nearly half a century - has been allowed to fade into retirement without even a whimper of official farewell, approbation or gratitude.

Sovereign of spout and monarch of the mike, David Coleman, 75 in April, has spent Christmas with his family in north Devon, mouse-quiet, unlauded and with the telephone off the hook. His last two-year contract with the BBC expires at midnight tomorrow.

The old boy may not necessarily have wanted it renewed, of course, but still the cold, curt statement issued by the BBC a few days ago was as witheringly cruel as it was significant.

The pointed lack of generosity by the suits in the Corp's corridors is shoddy and shameful. What is more, their gormless passing over of the chance of a damned good story - Coleman's going could be used to put out some bunting and celebrate the depth of the BBC's broadcasting heritage - is simply unprofessionally barmy.

At the very least, top-dog Greg Dyke should have organised a knighthood for Coleman in today's New Year honours.

With a final defiant croak, the Lord of the Larynx wrapped up his 16th Olympic Games - summer and winter - at Sydney in October. Two weeks ago, at a solemn ceremony at the International Olympic Committee's base in Lausanne, president Samaranch pinned to Coleman's lapel the rare Olympic Order medal. He was the first broadcaster or journalist ever to be so honoured, joining such lustrous Olympians on the plinth as Jesse Owens, Fanny Blankers-Koen, and Emil Zatopek. But not one BBC news bulletin of sight or sound - not even Radio 5 Live at three in the morning - thought to mention the fact, even as a throwaway filler.

Yet in that very same week every single BBC news bulletin, it seemed, was going to town on the announcement - with a year's notice, for heaven's sake - of ITV's motor-mouth Murray Walker stepping down. And as he was being lap-of-honour chauffeured around the chat-show sofas, Murray would have been the first to admit that as a one-off single-sport specialist, he was but a speck and a pygmy in the wide historical scope of sports broadcasting compared with Coleman's pioneering and sustained accomplishments.

His own present masters are obviously boneheadedly unaware of the unremitting, trail-blazing resplendence of Coleman's sportscasting youth and his prolonged prime. His colouring-in of the nation's first fuzzy monochrome pictures with his knowingly passionate prattle - twigging to engaging, precise perfection both the performers' and the viewers' aspirations - uniquely yanked sports comment and commentary away from plummy, moustache-strained forerunners like Leslie Mitchell of Movietone News or the BBC's Peter Dimmock.

It was the latter, in fact, who as Head of Sport gave the young BBC Midlands newsroom cub from his hometown Stockport Express his first national broadcast - on May 6 1954, the night Roger Bannister "broke" the four-minute mile. While they were scouring London for the shy hero, who was lying low in Clement Freud's Royal Court restaurant in Sloane Square, they filled in time with an interview by the fresh-faced Coleman of the golfer Roberto de Vicenzo. Coleman was up and running and when, in 1958, Dimmock launched Saturday Grandstand, he introduced the first one himself and then handed over to Coleman "who's 20 times better at it than me". Once upon a time, BBC top brass were more generous.

Like all professional perfectionists, Coleman working at his last was a hard man. He never suffered fools. He could reduce insecure minions to tears. He liked cold-eyed serious journalists around him, not television's camp vaudevilleans. He always had - and with good reason - the utmost conceit of his own value. His unflappability at taking producer's direction in spite of babels of din from his earpiece talkback was legendary, as was his awesome and never-bettered command (he'd swot diligently through the week) of the live teatime scores teleprinter. "Queen of the South 1 Airdrie 1, means Airdrie move up three places on goal difference, but Queen of the South slip a place because Brechin won today," he'd comment as the results came in.

Off screen, though, there was an appealing privacy, even shyness, about him. I worked as a (totally insignificant) rival for ITV through the 1960s. We tried to match Grandstand, fronted by nice, good Eamonn Andrews. "I'll blow you out of the water," David told Eamonn. To all intents, and mercilessly, he did too.

Coleman did 60 Grandstands a year for 10 years, then almost as many Matches of the Day. His race-reading of successive Olympic 100 metres finals - identifying eight men tearing straight at him in a 10second blur - was a party-piece of splendour. His most epic journalistic hour, or rather hours, came with his prolonged and sombre vigil, working off just one distant fixed camera, after the 1972 Munich Olympics murders.

Colemanballs in Private Eye irritated him to the point of anger, and he denied just about all entries attributed to him. But he had mellowed by the time Spitting Image came along and he would engagingly chortle at his crazed, check capped puppet, finger in earpiece, squealing: "Er, really quite remarkable, and er, I think it's impossible to keep up this level of excitement without my head exploding . . ."

At super Sydney last summer, the effervescent gurgle had become an ancient's gargle, the once compelling machine-gun yodel now an indecisive splutter. It was The End. He knew and we knew it. But it is the manner of The Ending that has been such an appallingly mismanaged botch. The old boy deserved better. So did we.