Harry Redknapp loves to tell a story. Those who are following him in the Australian jungle in I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here know this well already.
There has been the one about meeting his wife in the Two Puddings. And the one about meeting Prince Harry in a physio waiting room. Or the one about how he beheaded a plot of flowers with a jet washer.
The former West Ham, Portsmouth, Southampton, Portsmouth (again), Tottenham, Queens Park Rangers and (nearly) England manager has spent a career talking a good game.
Press conferences with him in the hotseat were always fun experiences. He has the gift of the gab and is extremely charismatic.
Over-egging
Some of the stories he used to regale the hacks with may have been a little, you know, embellished, but it was taken that any over-egging was in the interests of entertaining the press pack. The nitty gritty of groin strains, perceptions of opponents and the like, was reported faithfully.
The jocular tales were either kept out of publication or told as gospel – depending on the family-friendliness of the story in question. You could say that “reality” was heavily edited – as things also are in the jungle.
But his gift for spinning a yarn has transferred seamlessly into reality TV, as over the past week he has been the highlight of the I’m a Celebrity jungle, keeping his camp-mates’ spirits up with tales of yore.
There have yet to be many specifically sport related stories (how we’d love to hear his hilarious take on how Pompey went from FA Cup winners to League Two in the blink of an eye), nor have there been many that lift the lid, to use tabloid parlance, on players and rival managers’ off-field exploits.
Touching quip
Still, the story he told to John Barrowman on Tuesday about him and “Macca” meeting two women in a pub called the Two Puddings and “54 years later we’re [Redknapp and his wife Sandra] still going strong” was touching – ending as it did with a typical quip: “And Macca ended up as an undertaker so really Sandra had the better deal in the long term.”
And his disappointment over the lack of a bacon roll van “out the back” was similarly funny, especially his indignation that nobody had told him that there would be no time-outs on the show.
His exchange with Noel Edmonds, the TV presenter turned conspiracy theorist, just before the pair shoved creepy crawlies in their mouths (there’s a generous dollop of symbolism in there somewhere) was also priceless.
Redknapp warned that he hoped it had nothing to do with puzzles as “I’m not very good at doing puzzles”. Edmonds fired back the zinger “…or tax returns”, in relation to the 2012 court case in which Redknapp was cleared of tax evasion.
Five figure sum
Related to Redknapp’s puzzle-aversion tale is my favourite story he told me in 2006. I phoned him after he was named in a story about a betting sting concerning his move from Southampton to Portsmouth.
Apparently a five-figure sum had been exchanged on the Betfair site over the move, as was reported by the News of the World.
He was civil enough – he knew I had a job to do – but denied any involvement in the story with the emphatic insistence: “I have never even heard of faahking Betfair.” I thanked him for his time and hung up.
The very next day on my commute to the office, I turned to the back of the Metro newspaper to find a full-page advert for Betfair, featuring a giant picture of their new ambassador… Harry Redknapp. You’d have thought someone might have told him about it.
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