Former Soccer AM presenter Helen Chamberlain has revealed the ‘horribly intimidating’ sexual harassment she used to suffer from football fans at matches.
The 57-year-old Torquay United fan said she used to face regular chants of ‘get your t**s out for the lads’ and even ‘Chamberlain is a lesbian, she takes it up the a***’.
The broadcaster, who hosted Soccer AM for 22 years from 1995 until 2017, added that the abuse was ‘horribly intimidating’ but something ‘you just had to deal with’.
Chamberlain became known for presenting Sky’s light-hearted Saturday morning football talk show which was popular for its fun games and celebrity guests.
She was regarded as a pioneer for women in football broadcasting in an era when the men’s game was almost exclusively spoken about by men on television.
But she said her stardom also attracted a ‘a lot of hollering and shouting and stuff’ at games, which she felt unable to call out because it would have made things worse.
Speaking on the new Away Days with Woody and Piers podcast, Chamberlain said: ‘I used to get invited to a lot of games and I used to say ‘yes, I’ll come and join you for dinner’, because they’d want me to go for the meal.
‘I’d say ‘yeah, alright, I’ll go, but I need to go round the away end afterwards – I will not sit in your directors’ box with you. I need to go round where those 28 people [Torquay fans] are stood over there, I need to go over there’.
‘The worst thing was is a lot of times I’d have the meal and they’d say ‘well to get over there, you’ve got to walk round the pitch’.
‘Oh, the amount of pitches – and the game was nearly kicking off, everybody would be ready, and I’d be trudging round the pitch with a couple of stewards to massive choruses of ‘get your t**s out for the lads’, which I cannot believe we just let go for so many years – that it was just a thing that you had to go ‘yeah, yeah, alright, fine’.
‘The one that I… Cardiff away, they’d put the little pocket of rowdies right on the corner of the away… was ‘Chamberlain is a lesbian, she takes it up the a***’. I mean I just don’t get it… for 90 minutes.’
Chamberlain – fondly known as ‘Hells Bells’ – left Soccer AM seven years ago, and said modern-day fans have a better awareness that such sexual harassment is ‘just a s***ty thing to do.’
Speaking further about the abuse, she continued: ‘I find it amazing… I know we can all use that excuse of ‘oh, it was a different time back then’. But it was just something that happened that you just had to deal with.
‘If I’d stood up and said ‘stop doing that, it’s not very nice’, it would have been worse. So you just had to pretend you were OK with it. Obviously it’s horribly intimidating.
‘I’m quite a shy person – I know people say ‘yeah, right’ – but honestly, growing up, I’m quite a shy person and sometimes I get over that by being a little bit louder because inwardly, I’m actually going ‘Oh, I’m really intimidated and don’t want to be doing this, so if you just blah head on, you can bluff your way out of it, bluff your way through it’.’
Chamberlain added that she never suffered any abuse from fans of her team Torquay, and had ‘always been treated brilliantly’ by them.
But she said of other supporters: ‘There was just a lot of hollering and shouting and stuff, which wasn’t very nice. It just wouldn’t happen now. It just wouldn’t happen. I think people are more aware it’s just a s***ty thing to do.’
Soccer AM, which Chamberlain hosted alongside Tim Lovejoy, was cancelled by Sky in May last year after 28 years on air.
The final presenters were John Fendley and former footballer Jimmy Bullard.
During its run, the show aired numerous high-profile interviews with top football players, politicians and singers – and also featured humorous segments including Skill Skool and The Crossbar Challenge.
Despite its popularity, the show’s Soccerette segment was axed in 2015 after it came under fire for being outdated.
The feature saw young females as Soccerettes come onto the show modelling a Soccer AM T-shirt and then face questioning from the presenters.
The Soccerettes would be asked if they were single or in a relationship with their answer influencing the response they would likely receive. If they said they were single, they would often be met with cheers from those in the studio.
Chamberlain and Lovejoy have recently started co-hosting a weekly Mail podcast called Soccer A-Z, which sees them take a nostalgic and irreverent look at the past and present of football.
Away Days with Woody and Piers is a new podcast about following your football team which features two drummers – Plymouth Argyle fan Chris ‘Woody’ Wood from Bastille, and Southend United supporter Piers Hewitt from The Boxer Rebellion.