The UAE Football Show: Trailblazing programme aims to broaden the Emirati game's appeal

Step into the dimly lit studio atDubai Sports TV, and at first glance it appears a set of your typical television programme.

There’s the circular desk, with three seats stationed apart, arranged to encourage open conversation. There’s the two bulky broadcast TV cameras, one of which is manned by a man in kandora. Arching in an out of view is the crane camera, operated in the shadow, capturing those sweeping fade-in and fade-out shots that introduce and bid farewell to most studio shows.

There are teleprompters and a host; on-screen graphics and a guest, who changes weekly. Out of sight and almost out of earshot, too, is the director, sat in some room high above. Traces of instruction are audible almost even to those below not wearing an earpiece.

Yet the rotating logo on the giant background screen conveys that this is no typical television programme, at least in subject matter. It confirms that this is in fact, on a standard Wednesday afternoon in a darkened studio in Dubai, the coming together of years-long pitches and perseverance.

Welcome to “The UAE Football Show”, the first weekly English-language TV programme dedicated to Emirati football.

“I personally still can't quite believe it,” says Graham Clews, the TV and radio presenter and long-time Abu Dhabi resident, whom alongside Pedro Correia created and fronts the show. “We watched the first episode go out a few weeks ago and I was sat on the sofa and kept saying to my wife, ‘I just won't believe it until it's actually on the telly’. But finally I get to do this show.

“Whether it works or not and people embrace it - and the early indications are good - it's kind of out of our hands. But I've been banging on the door, Pedro has been banging on the door.

“And just