(Photo credit – Cameron Ward)
Winning a BAFTA temporarily and working for Cheltenham Town Football Club are two things you would not expect to hear in the same sentence.
But Murry Toms, though humble and conserved as he enters the room, has had a career that includes those exact feats.
“That’s what I like most about my job. It takes you to strange moments,” he says.
“One that sticks in my mind is that we did some campaign work for a Channel 4 programme called River Cottage. It was quite successful, we did a campaign called ‘Hugh’s Fish Fight’.
“It attracted about a million supporters in the end, and it did very well.
“So I was nominated for a BAFTA for doing that work, I went to the award ceremony and we got announced as the winner. We got on stage, we picked the award up at which point the host said, ‘I’ve read the card out wrong, you haven’t won it’. Had to get back down, so didn’t win the BAFTA.
“Well, I won it for 20 seconds!” he says with a grin.
Toms has spent the best part of 25 years working for a variety of agencies, sports clubs, and on TV programmes such as the early ‘Big Brother’ series’. It may seem like normal TV work, but back then it was far more impactful.
“The thing that was ground-breaking about it was that you were able to watch it online. Before that moment you weren’t really able to watch anything online at all, the web was at quite an early stage.
“So we streamed it, and got a lot of success doing that, and at the time it had become one of the biggest stories in media.”
His job has also taken him across the globe and given him the opportunity to work on an international stage.
“I travelled to Australia once to work at the Commonwealth Games with Wales. That’s a really big experience for me. I think I spent about the best part of a month there with the team.
“It was quite an intense experience. It was a month away, but it felt like a year. Obviously it’s quite nice to travel somewhere like that and work at an event like that on the international stage.”
Despite all the incredible things the 46-year-old has experienced, it’s Cheltenham Town that remains the closest to his heart.
The Completely-Suzuki Stadium – Home of Cheltenham Town Football Club
Toms started working at his hometown club in 2003, offering his time and media skills that he had already developed to help Cheltenham with their website and matchday programmes. But having the determination that he does, he wanted more.
“My role has grown and grown at the club, and currently I’m a director, so I sit on the board of directors at Cheltenham Town.
“I’m one of seven people that form an executive group and effectively run the club. Each of us has got our own specific area that we focus on, and mine is probably that media, marketing and communications.”
But as a fan of the club, those decisions are even more vital, and he knows himself that tough choices have to be made.
“I’ve got members of my family down the years stretching back almost 100 years that have played for the club, so it really feels like my club and I’m not really involved in it from a necessarily a career point of view.
“It is not difficult to remain a fan, but you do quite often find yourself in meetings where perhaps you kind of find yourself having to make decisions that you probably know will not be popular in the fan base and probably, if I stepped outside myself, I would think I probably would not like this if I was told this is coming.”
The amount of success Toms has achieved speaks volumes to a hard-working, forward thinking individual. But what defines him more is that even with the success, he is still not content, and he’s not sure if he ever will be.
“I don’t feel content. I don’t know if that’s just me and my nature, but I would like to build on what I’ve done.
“A lot of the work I’ve done in the past has quite a big social impact, so some of the stuff away from sports has had a positive effect in a number of communities around the country. That gives me a sense of reward in what I’m doing.”
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