a book of condolence is opened for people to pay respects to teacher sabina nessa, who was killed in south—east london. two canadians arrive home after spending over 1,000 days in detention in china over spying charges. now on bbc news, it's the media show. hello. i met ros atkins, and welcome to the media show. and i'm delighted to sate my guest today is one of the best—known and most influentialfigures in the uk media. he has his own production company, a new game show on itv, over eight million followers on twitter, a role in one of the best—known advertising campaigns of the last 25 years, a regular presenting slot on saturday nights on bbc one that he has had since 1999, and before all of that

of course he was pretty good at football as well. gary lineker, welcome to the show. thank you, nice to be here. as you listen to all of that, do you recognise it? do think of yourself as a media player rather than a retired football player? well, it beats crisp—flogger extraordinaire. to little kids, that's all i am. yeah, ifeel that i'm a media person now. it's been a long time since... ..a very long time since my career finished in the early �*90s. so, yeah, i've been very fortunate to have found another career post—football. obviously it still involves football, which is my great passion, but, yes, i feel i'm very much a media person these days. and when you were a player starting out, were you one of those in the dressing room who was tuned into the media, who had the paper and was like, "look what they're saying about our team or about politics?" in terms of the newspapers and looking about our team and our performances, i always would buy all newspapers

if i'd scored and if i'd played appallingly i would not buy any of them. right. nowadays it's all social media so very different cos it's mostly unavoidable. yeah, i was interested in the media during my career... i think once he got to my mid 20s and when i established myself in terms of being a player at the elite level, i started to think, encouraged by my agent john holmes who is still my agent to this day, encouraged to think about post—football and what i wanted to do. i never really saw myself as being a coach or a manager. but i was always interested in the media. i remember the world cup in �*86 the world cup in �*90, i meet old journalists now and i remember i used to go and sit with them and see how they write their opening lines for their newspapers. i used to sit with the radio people, the tv people, because i was actually quite

fascinated with how the media worked. and from that, i think i sort of saw a career ahead. thatjourney was a reasonably long one, though, wasn't it? you had to put in a lot of time. i started presenting in �*96 on television. my first bit was the highlight show for the euros, so euro �*96. and my second ever live presentation was the highlights of england—scotland and it drew 11 million viewers. not that you know that at the time, but... and i obviously wasn't very good at that stage, i think it's fair to say. good evening. tonight we will show you all the important action and reaction from the game that almost transcends euro �*96 itself. and here you are in 2021 still presenting match of the day most saturday nights. about three million people watch it live and over one million people on demand, so it's a significant audience.

how do you view the programme not as a bit of sports broadcasting, but as an institution, notjust for the bbc, but for the country, really? i think it's actually quite remarkable. i think it bucks the trend with so many other things, in terms of sports television. highlights? highlights don't really work in... i cannot think of anything else really, not in the way that match of the day does. but i think what it does it gives the nation. and we have to remember a lot of people in this country still don't have sky or bt or whatever where football is shown. so it gives them the weekly fix. and also we are addressing a much younger audience now because of catch—up, the bbc iplayer and stuff like that. so i think people love football so much in this country and it's a global sport as well, but also it's nice just to watch a few minutes of every game. it keeps you in touch

with everything that's going on. we've taken a long time to try and get the balance of the show right, between the amount of highlights and the amount of chat. we have to remember our audience is not sky's audience on a monday night for example — the people they want to watch a bit of football, the goals, let's pick up a little bit of analysis, so we do a lot of research into that. and itjust seems to work and people like it. what about the timing of the games and what's available, though? if we think of ronaldo and his remarkable comeback at old trafford, that happened at 3pm on saturday afternoon, good for you on the highlights programme because people to wait to see it but does it seem like an anachronism that a modern sport like football with a modern product like the premier league is not letting you see an extraordinary moment like that at the time? i think that's one of the great wonders of the premier league — that they do that because it doesn't really happen anywhere else. and it's done notjust to make sure that crowds of people still go to football matches all the time, which is you want full houses, full houses are really important to football and i think we've noticed that perhaps more than ever over this

period during the pandemic where we've had empty grounds. full football stadiums look better on television. if you started putting every game live on television, the crowds i think would inevitably be sparser. and i think that would diminish from the product that you're putting on television, yes, you can miss the odd big moment, but in a way that's quite a good thing. because you're also protecting the lower leagues — we're notjust talking about people going to watch premier league football, but we have an incredible football pyramid that we like to protect. so, if they're playing at 3pm on a saturday afternoon and you watch everyone staying in because they want to watch ronaldo�*s debut for manchester united, then that's not a good thing for them, so i think it's a great thing. and people play

football on saturday. they play on sunday afternoons. so i think actually i really like that aspect of the premier league. notjust because it's helpful to us on match of the day but it is of course helpful to us. it definitely is, it is part of the reason match of the day remains an institution on bbc one. can i ask you about your role within that institution? as been much reported, you're one of bbc�*s best paid presenters for your work on match of the day. why do you think you the bbc has decided to commit that much money to the presenter of that particular programme? well, i think it's obviously been a long—term process and my salary has gradually come down. but, no, obviously i was in a fortuitous position. i was sought after by numerous channels over the years. and football is global, it's big business, it does the biggest numbers on television, more than anything else — we've seen that on the euros again this summer. so... and there's a lot of competition and bbc had to fight for... it's hard talking about this for myself because obviously i realise

how fortuitous i am, but bbc wanted me to have... ..to head their football on television and i'm very grateful for that. and as we get this plurality of output from the footballing world, notjust in terms of punditry but where we can see the games, do you think there's a risk we are asking too much of fans? so, a leicester city fan may have to... well, everyone has to pay the licence fee but on top of that you might pay for sky and bt and amazon, it's quite a long list now. do you think that's the sport being reasonable towards fans? i mean, i think when you look at it, particularly when. . . maybe sky, in particular, who went obviously at the start of the premier league, i mean, they've survived on football. they've paid a lot of money for it, and they've helped football along the way, but you can imagine if suddenly they lost the rights completely to the premier league,

what would happen to sky sports? you know, it's very expensive, it's very expensive to watch sky sports. same with bt sport with the champions league, if they suddenly lost a champions league now, would people bother with a subscription for bt sport? and the same way with the sky sports. so tv channels pay huge, huge amounts of money for it. bbc pays a fair amount as well, not to the levels, they can't compete. a secondary question, which is some of the investors into football clubs, so if we take paris saint—germain with its connections to qatar, man city with its connections to abu dhabi, the newcastle saudi arabia story that's ongoing, that money is being pushed into football partly as an investment but partly because via the media, these countries or these organisations can change their public image.

are you always comfortable with that? not always, no, no. i don't know what we do about it. i think it's every club's supporter, they don't like it but then when it happens to their club, that's ultimately what they want because it might give them a greater chance of success, which is what fans want. but am i comfortable with it? no, not really. gary, we've talked a lot about football and sport, but it's notjust sport for you at the moment. you've got a new game show coming up on itv, it's called sitting on a fortune. just give us the elevator pitch. i don't want to build up too much because it's... you never know until it actually airs. but we recorded a few episodes, and it's going to be primetime sunday evenings i believe on itv within about a month or so, a month and a half. it's sitting on a fortune, and i think it's brilliant and the audiences that came to watch it thought it was amazing. it's got feel—good factor, people winning loads of money.

it's got tension. it's gotjeopardy right from the start. i think it works. but i've already built it up too much. was it the first time someone had called you and said would you do a saturday, sunday night entertainment show? might be. certainly the first time it's got through my agent. right. this isn't something you've been fending off? it never crossed my mind. more broadly, do you have aspirations to go outside of sport. you will know that... i didn't have aspirations before the game show, it never crossed my mind until he spoke to me about it. but when i watch what you talk about social media, so for example just before i came into the studio i had a look, you talked about var in sport, about des lynam's birthday, then about climate change and about animals in cages, and that's not unusual for you to take on a range of subjects.

given your platform, i would imagine someone, i'm guessing lbc or a broadcaster or a newspaper, would've come to you and said, "we like what you're doing on social media, can we build this into something? they have done lots of times, yeah. but i'm wary of that. who has come to talk to you? i think it's unfairfor me to say exactly who. i don't think that will be right because especially having said no, and i just don't think that would be the right thing to do. but there have been numerous ideas and some of them have been vaguely interesting and some of them not at all. and i have obviously... i'm like a normal person. i have interests. like everyone else. i'm interested in politics, i'm interested in... but what separates you from the rest of us if you have eight million followers on twitter. i don't know why i've got that, maybe because of the fact that i have other interests and it's attracted more people. it is a lot of people, i get that. so we see piers morgan signing up for rupert murdoch, and taking on a show

that will be streamed in australia, the uk and the us, talking about politics, talking about sport and a variety of issues, that doesn't appeal? no. no, i can have my view about things that i feel are important, which i've done. climate change for me is really, really important. i've got four kids. i'm not worried about... it's not about me going ahead. my generation will probably be all right, who knows? but i worry about my boys and worry about their children and their children's children. you know, are they going to have a planet that they can actually live on? so, important things like that. because i've got a big platform, i can put it out there. obviously, i think about the things that i do, erm... but it's interesting you say you want to impact these issues, you say you are aware of your platform and you're using it,

but you're not interested in a more traditional platform like a tv show or a radio show which would also allow you to address these issues. it's interesting. to a lot fewer people. so, that's interesting. your calculation is if you want to have a lot of influence, you've already got the platform? this is quite a new experience, having this platform as well, it's only come over the last few years, and i've never even cultivated giving my views, but nobody ever asked for my views before social media about other aspects. and i understand people that say we are not interested in the slightest about your opinion and i say, don't follow me. so, social media has given us all the platform to show a little bit about who we are. do i want to do those things for a living? no, not really. it's not about the money, this, it's is about me pointing out opinions. i don't think i would make any difference either to be totally honest. but i will put it out my views on the off—chance it might just make a difference. i wonder what has been your

experience of putting your views out on this platform that you've learned to use has been like? i looked up an exchange you had in 2016 when you said the treatment by some towards asian refugees is hideously racist and utterly heartless, what is happening to our country? and a few hours later, you said i'm getting a bit of a spanking tonight and i take it that means you had a torrid time on social media because of saying that. five years ago, i may have learned. what have you learned? at that time, i think i'm very supportive of refugee issues. and that was a big thing for me and ijust do find it very hard to understand how we can't have a degree of empathy for people's positions when they have to flee the country for war, for conflict, for possibly climate change in the future, who knows? for all sorts of different reasons that we can be so... i suppose awful in our treatment

of the way we view that. we don't want them here, and ijust found that, you can think of belief led me that day, but it annoyed me but i don't usually tweet as aggressively as that. and i don't think i do now, and probably would have rephrased it slightly. but you do tweet about issues on which there are passionate divisions, don't you? and you know when you press send on the tweet that there is going to be pushback and there could be some furore around that. do you find that stressful? not really. i don't find it stressful at all. i don't tweet anything i don't really believe in. and i... you see people with platforms take years off and say i'm taking a break from twitter, i'm taking a breather from this because they have found themselves in these endless online battles. often the online battles below your tweets, i was wondering if you're kind of aware of them or the impact on how you experience media? i rarely look at the the

mentions under my tweets. isee... i have the two different lists. i have the blue—tick people and that might might get a notification from them if i actually follow them. that's about the people i actually see. so, which is a shame because i think the abusive nature of some people ruins it for everyone else because most people, the vast majority of people, in this country are really good people. and kind. we just get that tiny percentage of the people on twitter that could upset you if you read them, and therefore you don't read them but by not reading them, you also don't read the really nice people and the really good people that actually want to and are having a different conversation about something. so, i avoid that because... because otherwise sometimes might be 1000 tweets nice to you, but the one that's nasty is the one

that you remember. so why bother with it? all right, you're not looking at the comments below but you will be aware that when you are posting these tweets, they are just relevant to you personally and could potentially be relevant to the bbc, which i know is not your only employer, but is maybe the highest profile employer. do you consider that when you send tweets? i consider everything when i tweet. i have three rules. i don't tweet when i've had a few drinks, any drink. i don't tweet when i'm angry. but i'm neverangry, that can't be true. there must be times... you don't get angry? yeah, i get upset. i can get a bit miffed, but i'm not... i played a whole career and never got booked, so i never tackle, so that's probably why. so i haven't really got that. but also the other thing is when i write a tweet, if i will read it through

and if i have a 1% doubt about it, i won't send it. that's my rule. so the three lineker rules for sending tweets, but one of the rules is not steering clear of controversial subjects because you have tweeted about them? like similar to climate change, i think they're important. and so my question with regard to the bbc is given bbc news's commitment to impartiality, and i know that for example simon mccoy when he was a presenter on bbc news took issue with one of the tweets that you sent and said this is not helpful for the work... they only apply to people in news and current affairs. they only apply... so those of the rules i suppose what i'm saying in the messages and you're breaking the rules, but what i'm trying to understand is do you considerjust the broader impact on how the bbc is perceived, even if you are within the rules? i consider myself a freelancer anyway. and so i work with the bbc, i have worked with bt for years,

i'm now working with itv, i've worked with walkers, i've worked with numerous people around. i'm always, i think i might try to be considerate about what it would mean to the people that have employed me at some point. the bbc ever called up and say, gary, please don't another tweet on the people's vote or whatever it may be? no, i stopped on brexit about two, three years ago. yeah, i noticed that. how come? because i thought it was done. i thought it was time. and i won't ever tweet about gloating if things go... i would not gloat, i want this country to be to brilliant. but i was strong on it at the time because that's what i felt. but i've left that for years apart from that i don't really tweet much about politics. was submerged in politics, but i don't back up to be censored. i think that's what i try to be.

——i�*m interested in politics, but i want to be sensible. so tim davey when he came in... i've had terrific conversations with him, but he never called me up and said you cannot tweet about that or you cannot tweet about this. but when you met him did he talk to you... did impartiality come up? i've known tim for a long time, from way back. but i don't think we talked about impartiality, no. because i was assuming that your agent would be deluged with offers from the media saying would you do this or would you do that? i was also wondering recently whether political parties have tapped you up? no, no. 0n the occasion i've had the odd direct message from people to try and help influence their political

side of things on twitter. and again i said i'm not doing that. i don't think that's right. does that happen a lot? only very rarely, a couple of times and i won't say who it was because it would not be fair but it has happened occasionally. but, no, i would not do that, and to be honest i am probably... i am your archetypal floating voter. people assume my politics all the time. but i'm actually fairly in the middle. i have voted for lots of different parties in my lifetime. so i'm not a lifetime subscriber to one party. i would not feel right in actually supporting one party anyway. that's interesting, aside from politics, that in that case a politician but more broadly people see you and your twitter platform as a media channel in its own right to try and lobby. that's. .. your 25—year—old self would've been surprised at that. extraordinary, isn't it?

extraordinary, ros. but i suppose the thing to look at the amount of people that follow you and think that could make a major difference. i mean, the people had the occasion of it, that you should be allowed to have an opinion about something else than football because you've got such a following. i said, well, i cannot... i don't manufacture my following, it's kind of happened over a period of time so people have decided to follow me, so what is the cutoff point then, is it so you have a view if you've got up 150 followers or maybe 3000 or is it 10,000 or1 million but 8 million you cannot? so... you didn't have a twitter plan, but as you tell me right at the start, you had a plan to go to the media when you are a 25—year—old, and as you were describing that as many time with the journalists and reporters and the broadcasters, you had a twinkle in your eye and i can see your enthusiasm.

do you still have that same love affair and curiosity with the media that you had then? i still love what i do, i really do. ifeel like sometimes i pinch my stuff think why me, why have i been so lucky in life? but i'm notjust saying that. the things i have done my football career are amazing, and i've had so much fun in the media over seven years. so much fun in the media over so many years. so, it's, yeah, i've still got that passion and i still love doing match of the day. i still love going to live games and... what is it about the media experience that you love? i thought about this before, and i think what it is is that you can never replace playing. there's nothing like it. there's nothing in life that gets even close to scoring a big goal in a big game. it's like an explosion of emotions. people say when you watch your team and they score a really important goal, how do you feel? it's like amazing, wejump up in the seat. it is like that when it's you that's

done it, it's like tenfold, a hundred—fold if you like. scoring to equalise against germany in a world cup semifinal, it's like indescribable. but what the media has given me, not those feelings so much, but it's replacing the team aspect of it so you still get the camaraderie even though it's a smaller team in television, but there's still the dressing room banter, that's still there. and theres�*s still the adrenaline rush when the light goes on because a lot of it, not all of it, especially now, is live. so, you know, when that red light goes on there's a buzz and there's a buzz. it's not quite comparable with the buzz about i got playing football, because if you mess up in television, no one really cares that much except myself. whereas if you mess up in a football match, you miss a penalty with one

minute to go and you lose, then that effects people's lives for quite a while. so there is a difference, but it still gives me, it gives me something and it's not quite comparable but it's not that far off. gary lineker, thank you very much indeed forjoining us on the media show. well, that's it for this week's eddition, join me next week for the media show here on the bbc news channel. hello again. after a very cloudy start to the day, very gradually through the afternoon, most of us saw some brighter weather pushing in, some sunshine, the cloud has completely cleared in a sussex to give those nice blue skies. not like that everywhere. in devon, the cloud stuck and we had some mist and fog over higher ground, some drizzle in the air as well. there is the extent of today's cloud, but out in the atlantic, this bright stripe of cloud you can see just here, well,

this is a cold front, and behind that cold front, the air is coming down from polar regions, so a much cooler air mass. that cooler air will surge its way eastwards across the uk into sunday night and into next week it is going to be a lot cooler than the weather we have seen over recent times. temperatures this weekend into the low 20s, but towards the middle of next week, we will be looking at temperatures struggling to make the mid—teens in places, so will certainly feel a lot cooler. 0vernight tonight, cloud will tend to rethicken, reform, the odd patch of drizzle just about anywhere, especially across the south and south—west, and mist and fog patches around our coasts and hills, particularly southern and western areas. temperatures, just like last night, 13 to 15 celsius. 0n into sunday's forecast, brighter spells for a time in northern ireland, but this band of rain, this cold front, the air turns heavy through this afternoon and it will be followed by gusty winds, winds of a0 mph, wet and windy weather pushing into western scotland through the afternoon.

east scotland, england and wales, with slightly stronger winds, a better chance at those winds will knock a few holes into the cloud sheet, and so should be a brighter day generally with more in the way of sunshine, still very warm for late—september. highs of 23. sunday night, our band of rain, our cold front continues to push eastwards across the uk, still there monday morning across east scotland from eastern england, but clearly out of the way. the weather then brightens up with a mixture of sunshine and showers, showers blustery and could be frequent and long—lived across north—western areas. maybe even an odd rumble of thunder, and the temperatures much closer to average — 18 in london is our average, 13 or 1a in the north—west even a smidge below—average. and then deeper into the week ahead, it stays very unsettled, heavy rain, strong winds, gales for some on tuesday and then we see further showers around later in the week. autumn arriving next week.

this is bbc news. the headlines at 5pm: queues at petrol stations as the government prepares to announce a temporary visa scheme to make it easierforforeign lorry drivers to work in the uk. keir starmer heads for a showdown with labour's left over changes to the way the party chooses its mps and leaders. a book of condolence is opened for people to pay respects to teacher sabina nessa, who was killed in south—east london. and it's the final day of campaigning in germany, where voters will elect a new chancellor.