A winning start for TV industry 5-a-side tournament

12 June 2017

An industry 5-a-side football tournament, organised by UKTV, is under way. The UKTV Ladle contest sees teams from All3Media, Warner Brothers, BT Sport, Sky, YouView, Red Arrow International, The 7 Stars, TakTalk, A+E Networks and UKTV's FC Dave all competing for the highly coveted trophy.

Previous tournaments in 2015 and 2016 have proved popular and competitive affairs with All3Media, Discovery, Fox and Handle Recruitment all having taken home silverware. The 2017 tournament is already proving controversial. Upon arrival at the new venue in White City, no penalty areas were painted on the pitch, leading tournament organiser, UKTV Senior Scheduler, Jim Tanner, to quickly re-write the rules of the game.

UKTV's Tanner has recruited the teams and organised the entire tournament this year. He also referees and keeps track of the scores and scorers.

Tanner said,

We've played in other industry 5-a-side tournaments as FC Dave for UKTV, but there are only a couple of them a year. The Ladle is a friendly affair and it's great to have so many people from different companies from across TV and the media involved, while also raising some money for great causes.

The UKTV Ladle also raises £850 for charity, with each team paying a fee to enter. This year, players from the Warner Brothers squad put on a bake sale at their offices in order to raise their entry fee. The money raised will be split between The Alzheimer's Society and a local Food Bank in Hammersmith, close to UKTV's head office.

The unique trophy on offer to the tournament winners, The Ladle, was hand built by UKTV's Chief Engineer, Dave Maynard, who was also the mastermind and craftsman behind Dave's Red Bull Soapbox Race entry in 2015.

Played over two Thursday evenings, the competition in the opening matches was said to be "fierce", while several balls were quickly lost over the fences. BT Sport's Tyrone White is looking to complete a different kind of hat trick in this year's competition. Hot shot White has been the leading scorer in both previous tournaments and will fancy his chances of shooting his team to glory again, although at the halfway stage this year he is joint top of the goal scoring charts with A+E Networks' Teon Harris. The overall winners will be ladled on Thursday 15th June.

For more information please contact:

Dave Barnsby, UKTV Senior Manager, Digital Press Office

or Lara Feinstein, UKTV Network Communications Executive

About UKTV

UKTV is a commercial broadcaster reaching over 41m viewers every month.

The award-winning independent has eleven imaginative brands - UKTV Play, Dave, W, Gold, Alibi, Yesterday, Drama, Really, Home, Eden and Good Food. These include the two most popular non-PSB channels in the UK and account for nearly 10% of the British commercial TV market. The company's most recent financial results showed record-breaking year-end revenue of £344.8m and EBITDA of £91.3m. It invested £151.2m in programming and related launches last year, and is a significant investor in British creativity.   The network embraces technology to deliver inspired channels to audiences through Freeview, Sky, Virgin Media, BT, TalkTalk, YouView, Freesat, Amazon Fire and UKTV Play, and distributes its highly valued original programmes to 200 territories.   Now celebrating over 20 years at the forefront of digital television, UKTV - an independent commercial joint venture between BBC Worldwide and Scripps Networks Interactive, Inc. (SNI) - is proud to be the first British television broadcaster in The Sunday Times top 100 companies list.
corporate.uktv.co.uk / press.uktv.co.uk / @uktv_press