Jenas was heir to coveted ‘Match of the Day’ throne, but red card shows he lost BBC dressing room
Ex-England star was poster boy for diversity at the Beeb, but now TV career lies in ruins
No one with a heart wants to kick a man while he is down. It may yet be confirmed that Jermaine Jenas conducted himself in ways that were, in the defence recently offered by Phillip Schofield, merely “unwise but not illegal”.
But as it stands, there won’t be too many people sympathetic to the plight of the former Tottenham Hotspur and England midfielder.
It is fair to say there has not exactly been a chorus of BBC television viewers clamouring for him to remain on air.
If, as seems likely at the time of writing, it turns out that Jenas (41) has made one misplaced pass too many, it must surely be curtains for a post-playing TV career that had been strikingly meteoric in trajectory until now.
Bought for £5m by Newcastle United in 2002 while he was still a teenager, he retained much of that fresh-faced star quality in his early TV days.
Good-looking in a boyband-ish way, and with an English east-midlands accent officially rated as fit for human consumption by audio experts, he emerged at just the time that the BBC was actively looking to get more diverse faces on screen.
A cultured midfielder on his day, his punditry by contrast was more workmanlike. But his face seemed to fit on the BBC and he achieved the rare feat of breaking out of the confines of the sports department when he landed himself a regular gig on The One Show.
Many a midweek football fixture found the sports fan idly flicking through the channels ahead of kick-off, pausing in surprise to say “Blimey, it’s Jermaine Jenas”.
The former Nottingham Forest box-to-box man Alan Partridged his way doggedly through features about unusual canal boats or cats suffering from migraine.
He seemed no worse at it than any of the other rictus-grin people who preside on those sofas. One could only really say good luck to him if that is how he wished to spend his evenings.
He was getting regular work as a football pundit on BT Sport, now TNT Sport, and had presented documentaries on knife crime and the racist trolling suffered by black footballers. He also hosted youth-targeted motor-racing Formula E.
All of which combined to round out an impressive CV that made him a decent bet to go all the way to the top – the big Match of the Day chair currently occupied by Gary Lineker.
He had put it about that he was keen, and with Alex Scott puzzlingly failing to train on as a presenter after a bright start, he was the most viable long-term Gary solution if the BBC wanted to avoid accusations of paleness and staleness.
But now the corporation has acted quickly, decisively and unequivocally in getting rid of Jenas.
He told The Sun that he was “a fall guy” for controversies surrounding Strictly Come Dancing and the disgrace of former news presenter Huw Edwards.
That is certainly a huge claim to make and effectively impossible to verify, although we can at least appreciate that he was speaking in distress.
Jenas added of the BBC: “I think it sums up where they are at right now. I think they clearly don’t know what to do, by the looks of it, because, like I said, how the situation was handled didn’t feel great.”
To the outsider looking in, it would appear that the BBC executives knew exactly where they are right now and what they wanted to do. Explained simply, it involved getting Jenas out of the organisation as quickly as possible.
There is no joy to be found in a person’s downfall, but one cannot help wondering if he had, as it were, lost the dressing room with colleagues and handlers at BBC Sport.
Without unpacking the gory details of the allegations, it’s hard to say for sure, but celebrities who are well liked do manage to survive all sorts of embarrassing or damaging episodes. Or they have to go and sit on a Qatar sun lounger with Richard Keys and Andy Gray.
Given that it creates a big pain in the neck for the Beeb bosses by putting the search for the next Match of the Day presenter back to square one, one can only conclude that they are as confident as they claim to be in the justice of this dismissal.