THE common perception is that bias runs through the Scottish football media like a virus. Agendas are everywhere, so it's said, and every club has at least one journalist actively working against them.

And sitting across from me in the lounge of a Glasgow hotel is definitely one of them.

So, Tom Miller, employed by Rangers Football Club, comment-ator of Rangers TV, which covers Rangers games for Rangers supporters all over the world, what team do you support?

Miller, the voice of Rangers TV and cult figure to fans of the club – and also Celtic supporters strangely – is cagey.

“It’s absolutely bonkers,” he admits. “It was summed up one day when my partner Pat and I came out of Jamie Oliver’s restaurant on George Square. Pat wanted a selfie with the bold Jamie in the background and this bloke was looking at me, it was a bit odd, and he said, ‘me next’.

“It was just an ordinary Rangers fan in the street which is hard to take on board because the bottom line is I’m a fan. I just got the opportunity to represent the club through the channel.”

Now I have him. Why, Miller, are you so pro-Rangers?

“I wouldn’t have lasted very long if I wasn’t,” he says with a laugh. “But it also has to have a level of honesty. You can’t paint it as something it’s not. Even in the poorest of games, the worst of fixtures, my enthusiasm has to come through for the fans to latch on to and take some comfort from.

“My mind goes back to being 3-1 down at Brechin City. It was a monsoon, a horrible day, and we came back and won 4-3. But some of the performances were abysmal. How, then, do you ask a global audience with a huge affinity for the football club to go through what, invariably every other week, was a turgid 90 minutes?

“My spin was that it was a sabbatical from where we should be and I tried to up it to a degree, which brought a bit of entertainment to things.”

Of course, he is biased, but also fair. Sure, he is hardly going to cheer when Celtic score, but last season, for example, in the March derby, he had to admit that Tom Rogic’s shot into the top corner of the net was a good goal, albeit it was delivered in funereal tone.

“Me saying ‘it’s five’ is the one constantly repeated to me on Twitter by Celtic fans,” says Miller about the game which saw Rangers’ biggest rivals win the league against them at Parkhead. “But if they followed the commentary through they would hear I was complimentary about the football.

“I can hardly do a summersault in the gantry when my team have just been on the wrong end of such a bad defeat. A level of perspective has to come into it.”

Perspective. It is not an easy thing to find in Scottish football. What there can be, though, is humour. One such moment came in the match that Rogic scored his brilliant goal, and 10-man Celtic won 3-2 at Ibrox. When Scott Brown’s long ball put Moussa Dembele behind the Rangers defence and as Wes Foderingham raced from his line, co-commentator Hugh Burns asked: “What’s the goalie daeing, Tom?” just as the Frenchman lobbed the ball home to make it 2-2 on the stroke of half time.

“That interrupted my flow,” says Miller with a rueful smile. “When you look back on it, Hugh was right. But he should have throttled it back a bit to allow the passage of play to take place. It wasn’t sterile. This is Rangers TV. With hindsight my answer would be: ‘He doesn’t trust his centre-halves.’

“Should Hugh have put it differently? Maybe, but at least he showed passion. Remember who our audience is.

“I have to say that 99 per cent of the Celtic fans I interact with are different class. You get the odd Rangers fan who is suspicious and one did say that I was ‘worth the watching’ because I follow the Celtic account!”

The watching man might have a point.

“I was fortunate. My uncle had a member’s seat, right behind the gantry in the main stand, this is early-1960s, and he took me to games. He was a fishmonger in Coatbridge. It did very well on a Friday, I’m told.”

Miller calls himself lucky, which he might well be, but he is good at what he does. It began almost as a hobby when he covered cricket for the now defunct Scot FM in the early-1990s. That led to football and, pun intended, out of the blue a chance came up to join Rangers.

“This was 1999 and the club wanted to put an audio-only commentary on the internet. It was Ian Ferguson’s testimonial with Sunderland, and I ended up doing the commentary.

“That was my first. I was nervous but I was told that I’d be a pioneer, the first voice of Scottish football on the internet. I had a go. I got away with it. I had the late, great Colin Jackson beside me, and we got 57,000 hits.

“To be asked back so often, and that’s 20 years now, I do have to remind myself how lucky I am.”

Miller felt lucky even at Elgin on the highest platform in the world – “we were looking down on the Nevis ski slopes,” he joked – fighting rain at Alloa, and trying to find positivity in a goalless home draw to Stirling Albion.

His love for Rangers is sincere. There is one hell of a book in him.

Miller says 15,000 fans tune in to every match from North America alone, getting up at silly o’clock.

What's the commentator doing? A really good job, that’s what.