Richard and Brian are both helpless with laughter.
Brian [starting again]: ‘Right, Richard, now we want a piece of music from you. What’s your taste in that direction?’
Richard: ‘I would like … [laughs] … Can I have … [more laughter] … Can I … [high-pitched giggles] … Can I have “Golden Years” … [hysterical laughter] … Can I have “Golden Years” or anything by David Bowie.’
Well, there you are. He got it out in the end.
And that is the end of the first half. In the second half, if I may, I would like to talk about a game called cricket.
I’m going to refresh myself and I suggest you do too. See you again in about twenty minutes.
Thank you very much.
INTERVAL
While the theatre audience enjoys a quick drink in the bar, we have the chance for a brief interlude with the Test Match Special team. Here, as reported exclusively in Private Eye, is part of the radio commentary from the legendary Test match between England and Australia at Headingley in 1981:
Henry Blofeld: ‘And we welcome listeners to the World Service with the news that the BBC is about to close it down. Meanwhile here at Headingley the position is that the Australians need only seventy runs to win with nine wickets left. Literally a hopeless task for England, Trevor?’
Trevor Bailey: ‘Oh yes, there’s absolutely no way that England can win this game now. It’s a foregone conclusion. Australia have got it in the bag.’
Fred Trueman: ‘I’ll go along with t’that, Trevor – and what’s more, I’ve never seen a worse performance by an England team in all the years I’ve been associated with the game of cricket, and that’s saying something. Wouldn’t you agree, Brian?’
Brian Johnston: ‘Yes, it’s a very sad end to a very disappointing game. As a matter of fact, during the lunch interval I ran into Charlie Badcock, who was over here with Bill Woodfull’s team in 1934, and old Badders agreed that it was the most disappointing game of cricket he’d ever seen. [Sound of loud clapping from crowd] On a lighter note, I’d just like to thank a listener in Pershore, Mrs Elsie Salamander – it is “Salamander”, isn’t it Fred? I can’t make it out.’
Trueman: ‘Looks like “Sellotape” to me.’
Johnners: ‘That would be a funny name for someone [laughter]. But anyway, we’d all like to thank the good lady in Pershore for sending us a sample of some really excellent shortcake which she’s baked for the Royal Wedding and she’s been kind enough to send us a tin of it.’
[More loud applause from the crowd]
Bailey: ‘I played for the Inscrutables once at Pershore. Lovely little town.’
[More loud applause from crowd]
Johnners: ‘My wife and I drove through Pershore once on the way to Malvern. I was speaking at the College Speech Day. First-class lunch they gave us, I remember. We bought a dog there.’
Trueman: ‘Did I ever tell what our dog did when t’vicar came to tea?’
Blofeld [laughing nervously]: ‘Yes, you did, Fred, and I don’t think it’s entirely suitable for World Service listeners.’
[Huge roar from crowd and chanting]
Bailey [munching]: ‘Well, I must say that this shortbread is very, very good indeed.’
Johnners: ‘And a very handsome tin it’s come in. It looks to me like an old Jubilee tin of some sort. Isn’t that George V?’
Trueman: ‘And I bet it’d fetch a few bob, a tin like that. People will buy any old rubbish these days.’
Blofeld: ‘Still, Fred, whatever you say about the tin, I think you have to agree that the shortcake is absolutely first-class.’
[Roaring from crowd now almost continuous]
Johnners: ‘By the way, should one say shortcake or shortbread?’
Trueman: ‘Up our way, we wouldn’t call it t’neither. We call it Parky Loaf, but it comes much thicker than this.’
Johnners: ‘Well, that’s something for our listeners to write to us about.’
[Thunderous applause from crowd, giving way to deafening cheers, singing, etc.]
Voice in background: ‘Mumble, mumble …’
Johnners: ‘Hang on a minute, Fred, Bill Frindall is trying to tell us something.’
Frindall [for it is he]: ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, Brian, but I just wanted to point out that England have won by eighteen runs.’
Johnners: ‘Thank you, Bill, for that interesting bit of statistical information. Fred, any comment?’
Trueman: ‘Well, all I can say is that that was one of the most fantastic bloody pieces of shortcake I’ve ever eaten in my whole life.’
Bailey: ‘Quite. In fact it’s what I’ve been saying all along …’
[contd. 94kHz]
PART TWO
An Evening With JOHNNERS
And now, back to the show …
Thanks for coming back!
Just before I talk about cricket, can I tell you a story about the Pope. Do you mind?
The Pope went to Ireland about five years ago and his plane was approaching Dublin when it was diverted to Shannon because of crosswinds. Waiting at Dublin to meet the Pope was a glistening white Rolls-Royce, in the charge of a chauffeur called Paddy Murphy.
They got on to Paddy and said, ‘Drive like mad to Shannon. The Pope’s plane has been diverted and you must be there when he arrives.’ So he raced to Shannon, the Pope’s plane flew in, and the Pope came down the steps and kissed the ground, as he always does. Then he looked up, and his eyes gleamed when he saw this wonderful white Rolls-Royce. He went up to the driver and said, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Paddy Murphy, your Holiness.’
‘Right, Paddy,’ said the Pope. ‘You get in the back. I’m going to drive.’
So the Pope set off and he was doing seventy, eighty, ninety miles an hour down the narrow Irish roads, when suddenly – ‘weeh, wah, weeh, wah’ – a police car signalled him to stop.
‘Can I see your licence, sir?’ said the policeman.
‘Certainly,’ said the Pope – he always carries one in his vestments – and handed it over.
‘The officer said, ‘Thank you very much, sir,’ and withdrew out of his hearing to ring up his superintendent. ‘Super,’ he said, ‘we’re in trouble here. I’ve found a very, very, very important man’s car going at ninety miles per hour. What action am I going to take?’
The super said, ‘Well, how important is he? More important than Terry Wogan? Is he more important than the Prime Minister, than royalty?’
‘Yes,’ said the officer, ‘I think he must be.’
So the superintendent said, ‘What’s his name?’
‘I don’t know what his name is, but he must be very, very important. He’s being driven by the Pope!’
I told you that I did the first twenty-four years after the war on television and I worked with lovely people like Peter West, and Richie Benaud, who came and learnt his trade with us. He learnt very well, didn’t he? He’s jolly good!
And, of course, dear old Denis Compton. Denis, remember, was the vaguest man there has ever been, and still is. He never remembers a single invitation, never arrives on time, always forgot his box or his bat or his pads, but went out and made a hundred with everybody else’s equipment.
About twenty-three years ago, Middlesex were giving a birthday party for him – his fiftieth birthday. Champagne corks were popping in the Middlesex office up at Lord’s when the telephone rang and they said, ‘It’s for you, Denis.’
He went, and came back looking a bit rum.
‘Well, who was it, Denis?’ they said.
‘It’s my mother,’ said Denis. ‘She says I’m only forty-nine!’
Right, Test Match Special. As I’ve said, I’ve been lucky all my life, and I was very lucky to get into Test Match Special. I did the twenty-four years on the telly, up to 1970, and then they got fed up with all my bad jokes and thought they would get in some Test players to do the commentary – which is very sensible, they do it marvellously. Luckily, I went st
raight into Test Match Special and have been there ever since.
It’s a lovely programme to do, because we go and watch cricket like any of you do, with friends. If someone says, ‘Have a little drink,’ we might have a small one, or if someone has heard a good story, we might tell it. I hope we never miss a ball, but we have fun and that’s the great thing to me about cricket.
The remarkable thing is that a lot of our commentary boxes wouldn’t pass the Factory Act. They’re very hot and stuffy and crowded, and yet I’ve never seen a single quarrel in one for forty-eight summers and I’ve never had one.Which is remarkable because we’re all extroverts – you’ve got to be to be a commentator – and we’re all different.
Of course, the commentary boxes aren’t made much better by old Fred [Trueman] arriving in the morning, smoking an enormous pipe. He fills the box with tobacco smoke! It’s a bit better after lunch because he goes round the boxes and has lunch with various people and he always comes back smoking a cigar. We always say his cigars are Adam & Eve cigars – when he’s ’ad ’em, we ’eave!
But the great thing is, we do have fun, and we hope we get that fun through the microphone. You can’t do this without wonderful people in the box, and I’ll tell you about one or two of them.
Sadly we have lost two very important ones, but one’s still going strong – the great Jim Swanton, who, as you know, commentated before the war and even went out to South Africa and did a commentary on the Test match there. Jim was a marvellous commentator on both radio and on television and a great summariser, on television especially. Of course, he’s written for years for the Cricketer and the Daily Telegraph and he still writes.
So he’s in great form, in his mid-eighties, and he still plays the odd round of golf. His ambition was to be a Second World War golfer – out in thirty-nine, back in forty-five!
On tours, though, he was a bit pompous. He used to stay with Governor Generals and arrive at the ground with a flag on the car! In fact, when he was on Desert Island Discs, Roy Plomley said, ‘Mr Swanton, how do you think you would cope with being on a desert island?’
And Jim said, ‘It depends who the Governor General was!’
He’s a great talker, and I rang up his wife the other day and said, ‘How’s Jim?’
She said, ‘I haven’t spoken to him for about three and a half days.’
‘Really,’ I said, ‘has he been away?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I didn’t like to interrupt!’
He was always very keen on the differential between the amateur and the professional. He thought it was a good thing. But I think he carried it a bit far when he refused to drive in the same car as his chauffeur!
We used to pull Jim Swanton’s leg unmercifully. I’ll just give you two examples.
One happened at Canterbury in 1963, when Colin Cowdrey had hurt his wrist at Lord’s and was helping us with the commentary. Peter Richardson was captaining Kent and we arranged with him to pull Mr Swanton’s leg. Jim’s got quite a deep voice, so we said, ‘When we start batting in the morning, and Mr Swanton comes on, we’ll wave a handkerchief from on top of our scaffolding.’
So this happened and I was doing the commentary and said, ‘I see Peter Richardson is just going up to speak to the umpire. I’ll hand over now to Jim Swanton.’
And Jim said, ‘Well, I don’t know what’s going on. He’s pointing towards us. It’s probably some small boys playing down below. Quite right!’
By arrangement with us, Peter spoke to Bill Copson, the umpire, who then walked towards us. When he was about fifty yards from our scaffolding, he cupped his hands and said, ‘Will you stop that booming noise up there. It’s putting the batsmen off!’
Of course, Colin said, ‘I didn’t quite hear that, Bill. Could you say it again?’ Poor old Jim!
And the other one was also in the same year, just before that, in 1963 at that wonderful match against the West Indies at Lord’s. Do you remember? Colin came in at number eleven, his wrist in plaster, two balls to go and six runs to win, and with David Allen at the other end. It was a draw, but it was a great match.
Before it started, Jim and I were doing the television and we were told, ‘There’s ten thousand people in St Peter’s Square, waiting for that white puff of smoke to come out of the Vatican chimney and announce that a new Pope has been elected. If this happens during the Test, we’ll leave it immediately and go over to our man in Rome, who’ll tell us who the new Pope is.’
So we were waiting for this call to Rome, yapping away, doing the commentary, when out of the corner of my eye I saw that the chimney on the Old Tavern had caught fire. Black smoke was belching out, so we got the cameras on to it and I said, ‘There you are. Jim Swanton’s been elected Pope!’
He was delighted.
Then there was dear old John Arlott, who died over a year ago now. Very sad. To me, John Arlott did more to spread the gospel of cricket than anybody. That marvellous Hampshire burr with the slightly gravel voice, especially in the years after the war, went all around the world, from igloos in Iceland to the outback in Australia.
Every time I heard him, you could smell bat oil and new-mown grass, and picture white flannels on a village green with a pub and a church. He could really conjure up cricket for you, and he was very good at painting a picture with words, because before he became a commentator, he was a poet.
To show you how quick he was, and witty, and how well he did it – there was a chap called Asif Masood, who bowled for Pakistan in 1962. Bill Frindall says I once called him Massif Ahsood. (I don’t think I did, but never mind!) This chap ran up with bent knees, very low down, and the first time John saw him, he said, ‘Reminds me of Groucho Marx chasing a pretty waitress!’
John was unique and we miss him terribly. He retired in 1980 and did his last broadcast during the Centenary Test. We knew that he was due to finish at exactly ten to three, and the cameras were there taking pictures of him, and we all thought he’d do a tremendous peroration, saying, ‘Thank you for all the years you’ve listened to me.’
But he got to the end of his over, and when it was time to hand over he said, ‘After a word from you, Trevor, it’ll be Christopher Martin-Jenkins.’
No more. He got up, walked out and disappeared into the pavilion. Luckily Alan Curtis, on the public address, had heard the broadcast and announced to the crowd: ‘John Arlott has just done his last broadcast.’
The Australians were fielding and they all applauded; the crowd stood up and applauded; and Geoff Boycott, who was batting, took his gloves off and clapped! But the interesting thing is that John only came back for one morning of a Test match in all that time afterwards, to open a stand for Neville Cardus. He didn’t ever come back. He stayed down in Alderney, where he wrote books on wine but wasn’t very well, sadly, for the last few years. But miss him? Of course we do. He was unique and there will never be another.
We’ve got one or two eccentric people in the box. What about Blowers – ‘my dear old thing’ – Henry Blofeld? Well, when he was aged eighteen, Henry was one of the best wicket-keepers at Eton anyone had ever seen. He was brilliant. He was captain of Eton, and one day he rode a bicycle out of the playing fields at Agar’s Plough into Datchet Lane and was knocked over by a Women’s Institute bus.
He was lying there in the road, the ambulance took him away and he had an operation on his brain. He got a Blue at Cambridge after that! So he was all right, but I think that accident gave him what I call ‘busitis’, because doing a commentary at Lord’s, he’ll say, ‘That ball goes through to the wicket-keeper. I can see a number eighty-two bus approaching … a Green Line bus … a double-decker bus …’ He has buses on the brain! At the Oval once, he said, ‘I can see a good-looking bus!’
At Headingley, he said, ‘I can see a butterfly walking across the pitch … and what’s more, it’s got a limp!’
If a pigeon flies by, it’s ‘a thoughtful-looking pigeon’, and he always gets terribly excited. Someone dropped an easy catch and
he said, ‘A very easy catch. Very easy catch. It’s a catch he’d have caught ninety-nine times out of a thousand!’
There’s Don Mosey, ‘The Alderman’. He was talking about David Gower’s one hundredth Test match at Headingley in 1989 and he said, ‘This is David Gower’s one hundredth Test match and I’ll tell you something. He’s reached his one hundredth Test in fewer Test matches than any other player!’
Then we have ‘The Bearded Wonder’, Bill Frindall, the statistician who does all our work for us. He gets up at half past five every morning and enters into his books every single score made the day before, including telegrams that have come in from overseas. He’s got details of every single innings played by any first-class batsman. It’s a marvellous record, in all these books, so we don’t have to do too much homework.
About eight years ago, during The Oval Test, there was a cocktail party to which he was invited, and he went. There was an Arab prince there, in full regalia with the head-dress and white robes, and this Arab prince said to Bill, ‘I’ll give you fifty quid for your favourite charity, if you dress in my clothes tomorrow and score all day in the commentary box.’
An Evening with Johnners Page 6