From "The Telegraph".

Alec Weeks, who has died aged 84, brought many great sporting events to television screens as producer of the BBC's Grandstand and Match Of The Day programmes, and earned particular acclaim for his coverage of the 1966 football World Cup final when England famously beat West Germany 4-2 in extra time.

In 1966 only 15 million British homes had television sets. Yet more than 32 million viewers watched the final in Britain, more than the audience for the Coronation 13 years before, and more than that for the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, 31 years later. Another 30 million people were watching around the world, a television audience record.

Further figures underline the sheer scale and complexity of Weeks's operation in July 1966: a massive technical crew of 54; 22 miles of cable; six cameramen (modest by modern standards), most at their posts for seven back-breaking hours.

Then, in the final 30 seconds of extra time, Weeks floated his historic black-and-white pictures over the agitated commentary of Kenneth Wolstenholme as Geoff Hurst collected the ball from the England captain Bobby Moore and attacked the German goal.

"Some people are on the pitch ... They think it's all over!" spluttered
Wolstenholme. Hurst volleyed with his left foot and scored his third goal, England's fourth. "It is now!" Wolstenholme cried in triumph. Final score: England 4 West Germany 2.
For more than 30 years Weeks's name was on the closing titles at the end of every major sporting event or programme televised by the BBC. He produced (and usually also directed) nine summer and winter Olympics, 15 FA cup finals, six European and world athletics championships, eight World Cup football tournaments and 16 European finals, four Commonwealth Games and several London marathons.
In his cramped command-post in the BBC outside broadcast van, or scanner, on Saturday afternoons, Weeks took a hands-on approach when he directed a top league fixture for Grandstand and, from 1965 until he retired in 1987, Match Of The Day. He was that programme's executive producer from 1965 until 1980.
Using only four cameras, Weeks virtually set the benchmark for televised football coverage without the benefit of modern state-of-the-art production vehicles and the digital gizmos of today.

He was in charge of televising the 1984 Winter Olympics at Sarajevo, the highlight being the figure skating of the British pair Torvill and Dean to the mesmerising music of Ravel's Bolero. Weeks made a shrewd decision to cover the couple's entire routine on a single news camera, with no cuts or mixes. "For the next four minutes we saw T&D make love on ice," he recalled. The pair were awarded the gold medal, having scored maximum marks, nine straight sixes. "I looked around our control room and there was hardly a dry eye," he noted.
Weeks was a demanding taskmaster who ran his outside broadcasts like military operations, with a minute attention to detail. Very much a one-man band, he would book everything right down to the crews' lunch.
He sheepishly confessed, however, to having invented the cult of the football pundit, the expert former player or manager pontificating about the game. Weeks came to regard this as the "disease" of television soccer.

Alec Percy Weeks was born on February 2 1927 at Watford, the son of an electrician, and educated locally. In 1941, aged 14, he joined the BBC as a 10s-a-week office junior, delivering the post and filling inkwells in the offices of the wartime headquarters for overseas broadcasting at Aldenham House near Borehamwood. Two years later he moved to Broadcasting House in central London as a junior programme engineer.

In this role he supplied "spot effects" for a range of programmes, including ITMA, Children's Hour, War Report and radio dramas. Later he worked on concerts featuring the Glenn Miller orchestra, moving microphones between numbers. He progressed to junior studio manager, and later recalled arriving at a news studio to prepare for the 7am bulletin to find the newsreader in the studio camp bed with a beautiful programme engineer ("from a fairly famous family," he added helpfully).

After demobilisation from the RAF, Weeks returned to the BBC to be assigned to Sports Report as studio manager, and was regularly lent to Outside Broadcasts as a programme assistant. From 1955 he was in charge of sport on the BBC's General Overseas Service, and covered the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff for radio in 1958 before moving to Manchester as a television sports production assistant.
For the newly-launched Grandstand programme on Saturday afternoons, he covered greyhound racing, snooker (in black and white) and boxing – a sport in which Weeks himself had excelled in the RAF.
The following year he directed his first soccer match for television, the second half of a European Cup quarter-final between Burnley and Hamburg. He became a Grandstand producer in London in 1961, and in August 1964 was producer in the videotape area for the first six editions of the newly-launched Match Of The Day.
For the first time, viewers could enjoy a cut-down version of an entire game within a couple of hours of the event. Weeks's debut was a fixture between Liverpool and Arsenal, ending at 4.50pm. Weeks had an edited 45-minute version ready for transmission at 6.30pm.

But some problems took weeks and even months to solve: advertising hoardings around football grounds seemed mysteriously to get bigger ahead of a BBC outside broadcast, and ordinary floodlighting in the average stadium proved insufficient for colour pictures.
In bitter winters, Weeks supplied cameramen whose faces had become encrusted with snow and frost with miniature bottles of brandy to thaw themselves out. And there was the perennial problem of last-minute fixture cancellations because of bad weather, which could mean de-rigging at one location and travelling with full kit and crew to another.
Post-match interviews of managers and players sometimes tested Weeks's powers of diplomacy. Rather than see the taxman help himself to a large slice of the fee, many of football's finest instructed Weeks to pay them on the spot in cash or in kind. While some managers asked for flowers to be sent to their wives, Brian Clough demanded "a bottle of champagne, young man" – a case if he had to travel to a studio.

A large, affable figure, Weeks was a strong executive producer and not a man to suffer fools gladly. He expected his commentators, however famous, to prepare properly, to be part of the team and to keep their egos in check.
He lamented the passing in 2006 of Grandstand, with its clattering teleprinter (later superseded by the vidiprinter) and the Saturday teatime football scores, read (until his death in 1995) by Len Martin, who anticipated each result by the inflection in his voice.
Of the many awards he received for his work, Weeks was particularly proud of the Bafta trophy for best outside broadcast of 1976, the FA cup final between Manchester United and Southampton.

He retired on his 60th birthday in February 1987. In his memoirs, Under Auntie's Skirts (2006), he described how, early the following morning, the BBC sent two men from the rental company to repossess his staff-issue television set.


Alec Weeks, who died on April 30, is survived by his wife, Pamela.

Source:-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/sport-obituaries/8529286/Alec-Weeks.h...