By the age of 22 he was editing a local newspaper in Cheshire, with hopes of developing his running career. Born in Cheshire on 26 April 1926, although his family originally hailed from County Cork, Coleman went to a local grammar school and became a keen amateur runner, winning several national cross-country championships as well as the Manchester Mile. Coleman began presenting Grandstand in 1958 Football is like a roundabout. Sometimes you are up and sometimes you're down Radio 5 Live reporter

His successor in the Grandstand chair, Frank Bough, was full of admiration. "Coleman was the only one who could tell you that a win had put Arsenal on top of Division One on goal average, or that was East Fife's first score draw in 19 consecutive games," he said. Until his retirement, motor racing commentator Murray Walker frequently featured in the column. His excitable delivery led to so many mistakes that they began to be labelled "Murrayisms". [1] Examples include "We've had cars going off left, right and centre", "do my eyes deceive me, or is Senna's Lotus sounding rough?", "with half of the race gone, there is half of the race still to go", "There is nothing wrong with the car, apart from that it is on fire", "That car is totally unique, apart from the car behind it, which is identical", and "The gap between them is now nine-tenths of a second; that's less than a second!". BBC broadcaster Barry Davies described Coleman's coverage as "just the right balance of authority and sensitivity". Colemanballs A professional perfectionist, he could be a hard man to work with. Coleman could reduce insecure minions to tears, and often did. He liked cold-eyed, no-nonsense journalists around him, not television's regular vaudevilleans. He had always – and with good reason – a fine conceit of his own value.

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Fantoni, Barry; Larry (2010). Private Eye's Colemanballs: No. 15. Private Eye Productions. ISBN 978-1-901784-54-1. In 1984, he won the Television and Radio Industries Club award as Sports Presenter of the Year and, in 1992, he was awarded an OBE. He finally retired from broadcasting in 2000. Tributes Coleman's vast sporting knowledge made him the ideal host for Question of Sport, which became British television's longest-running quiz show. Bill Beaumont, Coleman & Ian Botham on a Question of Sport Working from scant information and a closed circuit TV monitor, he held together the coverage of the unfolding horrors in Munich as Palestinian gunmen held hostage, and then killed, a group of Israeli athletes. Laura Robson has just made the best possible start to her professional tennis career, she won the first set and lost the next two and is out.

As well as fronting Grandstand for 10 years, Coleman also co-presented the BBC Sports Review of the Year from 1961 to 1983. Coleman was one of the BBC commentators for the 1966 World Cup finals After he had fronted Grandstand for a decade, he moved to a midweek slot with Sportsnight (1968-73), though later returned to the Saturday programme. From the early 1970s he was the BBC's senior football commentator, and from the early 80s concentrated on athletics. He brought a businesslike geniality to chairing A Question of Sport (1979-97); the programme's only other two presenters have been David Vine from its start in 1970, and Sue Barker till the present. He was also a co-host of the BBC Sports Review of the Year (1961-83). Undeservedly or not, it is the lot of the British sports commentator to suffer the barbs and carping of his or her public. Some of them, and Coleman was certainly one, are as much a part of the national picture as the sportsmen whose acts of valour they describe. Private Eye's Colemanballs is the distillation of that. That the sports blooper column should be named after him has never remotely undermined Coleman's position as the undisputed founding father of modern British sports broadcasting, the commentator who moved the hearts other commentators cannot reach.

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It was perhaps because of this that Coleman was never frog-marched off to the minority sports - badminton or bowls, fencing or volleyball - where his sense of drama would have been misplaced. His legal wrangle with the BBC in the mid-1970s, which kept him off the screen for a year, centred on his complaint that he was used too parsimoniously and did not have enough editorial involvement. Fantoni, Barry; Larry (1996). Private Eye's Colemanballs: No. 8. Private Eye Productions. ISBN 978-0-552-14521-3. Fantoni, Barry; Larry (1984). Private Eye's Colemanballs: No. 2. André Deutsch. ISBN 978-0-233-97700-3.

Coleman was famously prone to gaffes, including: "That's the fastest time ever run - but it's not as fast as the world record." He became the BBC's senior football commentator in 1971, covering five FA Cup finals, before handing over to John Motson in 1979.

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That dispute revealed a hard-headed side to the man whose affability is one of the ingredients which make the Coleman-chaired A Question of Sport, with its Pringle pullovers and pub repartee, a cosy long-running success. From Fern Britton asking if a guest’s great grandfather had any children, to Anthea Turner urging people to use cars as fridges, to Geoffrey Boycott saying Indian police have “atomic weapons”, 2010 has been a vintage year.