Backblip From The Archive: What A Night!

Pictured is ex-Glasgow Rangers goalscoring legend and present manager Ally McCoist, BBC pundit Jimmy Hill and Scottish comedian Fred MacAuley at a party in the Eiffel Tower two days prior to Scotland taking on Brazil in the opening game of the 1998 World Cup in France. This turned out to be an eventful night in more ways than one. Also present were actor Ewan MacGregor, Ulrika Johnson and her then partner and footballer Stan Collymore. Everyone ended up in a Scottish bar in the centre of Paris rather the worse for wear. Stan Collymore got in an argument with Ulrika and punched her in the face giving her a black eye and making the headlines the next day in the process. That was the end of that particular relationship. Unfortunately I had left the bar an hour or so before the punch-up or else that would be the backblip for today. Spent the following day trying to catch up with Collymore and a bruised and bloodied Ulrika.

Tech' Alert: It may be interesting to know that my newsaper at the time supplied me with a Kodak NC2000 digital camera to cover the 1998 World Cup. (This blip was taken with it). We had already been using these cameras on a day to day basis back in Glasgow and mainly on deadline news jobs. Now get this, it was a 1.3 megapixel camera (yes you read that correctly, 1.3 megapixels), it had no LCD screen, every image had a magenta cast that had to be colour corrected post, it was massive and heavy, and it cost....wait for it.....16,000 pounds! That didn't include lenses, hard drives etc. It was state of the art though and enabled us to send images on the move from any location.