Scotsport

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Scotsport
The Best of Scottish Football
Format	Sport
Run time	90 minutes
Starring	Grant Stott, Andy Walker, Jim White
Channel	stv, ITV1 Border Scotland
Air dates	September 18, 1957 – Present

Scotsport is a Scottish sports television programme. It is recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as the world's longest running sports television programme. The programme is still broadcast on stv, as well as on ITV1 Border Scotland.

The show began on 18 September 1957 [1], and is best known for its dedicated coverage of football from the top division in Scotland, currently the Scottish Premier League, and more recently the coverage of the Scottish First Division. The show also follows Scottish clubs in the UEFA Champions League via live matches and highlights programmes, though is simply branded as Champions League Live. Scotsport's main rival is the BBC Scotland produced Sportscene, fronted by Dougie Donnelly.

The show lets viewers call or text in their views on Scottish football. The Monday night show features late-night chat with football experts, and the latest news on the SPL.

Scotsport airs every Monday night at 11.05pm, on stv.

[edit] The Team

Current hosts of Scotsport

Despite being the world's longest running sports television programme, there has only been four main anchors in nearly 50 years of broadcasting, including new presenter Grant Stott. The previous main anchors of Scotsport were Arthur Montford, Jim White, who defected to Sky Sports in the mid-90s, and the recently departed Jim Delahunt.

Delahunt announced he would be working for Setanta Sports in August 2006, after more than eight years as anchorman. [2].

On Friday 8th September, stv announced sports columnist and broadcaster Jim White (not to be confused with Jim White, the former presenter of Scotsport) as Delahunt's replacement as anchor of stv’s Champions League Live coverage. Shortly afterwards, stv announced Grant Stott and Andy Walker as the new presenters of Scotsport. Stott and Walker began co-anchoring the programme on Monday 16th October.

Currently, featured match highlights are commentated by Archie Macpherson, Jock Brown and Ian Crocker. Rob MacLean, Ken McRobb and David McKinney, amongst others, provide additional commentary for the shorter highlights packages.

[edit] Spin-Offs

During the seasons when Scotsport owned the rights to Scotland's premier Rugby league, live matches and highlights were shown under the Scotsport Rugby Roundup banner.

For the years where stv had the highlights rights for both the Scottish Premier League and the First Division, Scotsport was divided into Scotsport First, which went out on Sunday mornings and retained a traditional programme format, and Scotsport SPL, which was known for trying out ideas that hadn't been widely used for sports television programmes before, including multiple presenters and a live studio audience. Due to heavy criticism from fans, these methods have since been dropped for the 2006/07 season.

Scotsport Fanzone was broadcast in the latter half of the 2005/06 season on Thursday nights. This forum-based show encouraged Scottish football fans to have their say on the week's news. Despite not having currently re-appeared for the 2006/07 season, several sections from the show have been incorporated into the now live Monday night Scotsport.