An Evening with Johnners

by Brian Johnston

  Barry Johnston

  1996

  PART ONE

  An Evening with

  JOHNNERS

  MUSIC: Horseguards, Whitehall played by the Sun Life Stanshawe Band.

  The theatre audience hears the familiar sound of a brass band playing the theme tune from the Radio 4 programme Down Your Way. Brian walks on stage to loud applause and seats himself on a high wicker stool.

  Thank you very much.

  How nice to be in Canterbury. Although I have to admit, I had to stop myself just now from saying, ‘Hello Canterbury.’

  I have got into this terrible habit, wherever I am – it can be Bournemouth, Manchester, Birmingham – I say hello to the town and I’ve got be very careful, because next week I go across to the isle of Wight and I’m speaking to the Ladies’ Luncheon Club at Cowes!

  I am a little bit diffident about speaking to you tonight, for a change, because last week I gave what I thought was the best after-dinner speech I had ever given, but when I had finished a rather drunk chap (at least I hope he was drunk) came up. He said, ‘That’s the most boring speech I have ever heard in my life.’

  And this upset me a bit, but the chairman of the dinner, who hadn’t heard what he said, dragged him away and said to me, ‘Don’t pay any attention to him – he only repeats what everybody else is saying!’

  It’s marvellous to see so many people. It must be a very bad night on the telly. You know, you can go and speak and there are very few people. A friend of mine the other day was paid a large fee to go to address what he hoped was a big audience in a town hall. He walked out on the stage and there was one chap sitting in the front row.

  Well, he had been paid the fee so he gave the speech, about forty-five minutes, then turned to this chap and said, ‘Thank you very much, sir, now I am going.’

  And this chap said, ‘Please don’t go. I’m the second speaker!’

  From what I can see of the audience, I am willing to bet that I am the oldest man in the theatre tonight and I am going to warn you about what’s going to happen when you get to my age. Three things happen.

  First thing is you lose your memory …

  I can’t remember what the other two things are!

  But if the ladies will excuse me, I will just tell you what might happen to the men. This is a bit serious really! A friend of mine was celebrating his sixtieth wedding anniversary, his diamond wedding. He and his wife decided to have a second honeymoon – to go to the same town, same hotel, same bedroom, same bed.

  They got into bed and the wife put her arms around his shoulders and said, ‘Darling, do you remember how romantic you were sixty years ago? You bit me in the neck, you bit me in the shoulder, you bit me in the breast,’ and he leapt out of bed and went to bathroom.

  She said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he said, ‘Getting my teeth!’

  I have been around rather a long time and it’s interesting how sometimes one is recognised and sometimes one isn’t. About twenty years ago, coming back from Australia our aeroplane stopped at Bahrain and I walked up and down the transit lounge to get a bit of exercise. An Englishman came up to me and said, ‘I think I recognise you, don’t I?’

  I said, ‘Oh, probably,’ and reached for my pen. I thought he was going to ask for an autograph.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘did you ever drive a bus in Watford?’

  I said, ‘No.’

  ‘Dead spit of a chap who did,’ he said and walked away!

  And then, only about two years ago in St John’s Wood, where I live, I went to our cleaners and there was a new lady behind the counter, a holiday relief. So I said, ‘Can you clean these trousers, please.’

  She said, ‘Certainly, Mr Johnston.’

  I said, ‘Very clever of you to recognise me.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I recognised your voice before you even spoke,’ if you can work that one out!

  And talking of stopping off, I always fly straight back if I go to Australia or anywhere, I don’t stop off for a day’s rest on the way. But when I was in Australia last time we had a married couple with us and they decided to have three days in Bangkok on the way back. They had two very pleasant days and on the last day the wife said, ‘I’m going shopping, you go and amuse yourself.’

  He thought, Good idea! So he went to the hotel porter and got the address of a massage parlour. He went and knocked on the door and a little Thai girl came and said, ‘What can I do for you, sir?’

  He said, ‘I’d like a massage.’

  ‘Certainly, sir.’

  ‘How much will that be?’

  ‘A thousand dollars.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I can’t afford a thousand dollars. Two hundred dollars is the most that I can afford.’

  She said, ‘I’m sorry, a thousand is our price. You’d better go somewhere else.’

  Well, he didn’t bother. He went window shopping and went to pick up his wife at the appointed time. They were walking back to the hotel when down the street came this Thai girl, who looked at his wife and said, ‘There you are. See what you get for two hundred dollars!’

  I was in India last winter for two of the Test matches. It is a very strange country. Do you know, I still don’t know whether they drive on the left or the right. They steer very well, even around the cows lying in the middle of the road, but it is all very frightening.

  And, of course, the food is very tricky. But they have got a new dish especially for Englishmen. It’s called ‘Boycott Curry’.

  You still get the runs, but more slowly!

  Now the theme of this evening is really to let you know how lucky I have been in life and how much fun I have had. I started off by having a wonderful family: a mother and father, a sister, two brothers – a very close family.

  My wife has put up with me for forty-five years, which is very sweet of her, and we have five lovely children, and they have produced seven [now eight] grandchildren. And it is, quite seriously, very important if you are doing a job like mine, rushing around and meeting a lot of people, to come back to a home in which you know there is love and happiness and comfort. So that’s my luck Number One.

  I got lucky in my education, because I was sent to the oldest preparatory school in England. The food matched the age of the school! It was in Eastbourne, Temple Grove it was called, and I only remember two things about it really. The matron had a club foot, which was unusual, but the headmaster had a glass eye. It was a very well disguised glass eye and I said to someone, ‘How do you know it’s a glass eye?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it came out in the conversation.’

  I then went to Eton and again I am lucky, because it’s the best trade union in Great Britain. There are so many Old Etonians around the place; you meet them and it helps and I have lots of happy memories there.

  My late friend, William Douglas Home, the playwright, did something which amused me. He was sitting an exam and they brought the questions to his desk and one of them was: ‘Write as briefly as you can on the future of one of the following subjects.’ The first was socialism and the second was coal. So he thought for a moment and chose coal. He wrote one word: ‘Smoke’.

  And he got seven out of ten, which wasn’t bad!

  We used to go to a housemaster’s house for our history lesson and if the telephone rang in his study he would say to one of us, ‘Go and answer the telephone.’ At the time he was very keen on the film actress Anna May Wong. She used to come and have dinner with him and he rather fancied her.

  One day the telephone went and he said to this chap, ‘Gilliat, go and answer the telephone.’

  Obviously he hoped it was Anna May Wong and when Gilliat came back two minutes later the master said, ‘Yes, yes, who was it?’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ said Gilliat, ‘Wong number!’

  That was Eton. Then I went to Oxford, where I read history and P. G. Wodehouse and played cricket about six times a week, which was good fun. And I only achieved one thing there which I don’t think
anybody else has ever achieved. I actually scored a try at rugby wearing a macintosh. I’ll tell you how it happened.

  I was playing for New College against Trinity and someone tackled me and pulled my shorts off. I went and stood on the touchline while they went to get another pair and someone said, ‘You’d better put this macintosh on to cover your confusion,’ which I did.

  The ball came down the line and when it got to me on the left-wing I said, ‘Outside you!’ and took the ball. The referee should have blown his whistle because I hadn’t got leave to go back on, but he was laughing so much that he just went pffftt and couldn’t blow and I touched down between the posts!

  Then, like so many people of that age, I wasn’t sure what career I wanted to follow. So I was lucky, in a way, because we had a family business. We used to export coffee from Brazil. We had an office in London and so, reluctantly, I went in there. I didn’t understand a thing about coffee. I can confirm there are an awful lot of coffee beans in Brazil but that’s about all I can tell you.

  I don’t think the manager took to me very well. He thought he’d got me one day. I’d had a late night and arrived about ten o’clock and he summoned me to his office.

  ‘Johnston,’ he said, ‘you should have been here at nine thirty.’

  ‘Why, sir,’ I replied, ‘what happened?’

  And he didn’t like that a bit. So it was a good thing for me when the war came and I was able to say to them, ‘Sorry, I won’t be coming back.’

  Again, I was lucky, because just before the war began, in about March 1939, some friends and I decided that war was obviously going to come, so we ought to try and get into a good regiment.

  By a little bit of luck, and the fact that a cousin of mine was commanding the 2nd Battalion at Wellington Barracks, I got in what obviously I think is the best regiment in the British Army – the Grenadier Guards. We had to train every evening. We used to go from the City in our bowler hats and pinstripe suits and march up and down throughout that hot summer, until in the end they said we were qualified to be officer cadets.

  When the war came in September this meant we could go straight to Sandhurst to learn how to become officers.

  I can never resist making a bad joke, as you probably know, and I tried one out in the first fortnight I was there. They used to have a thing called TEWTS: Tactical Exercise Without Troops, where they took twenty of you out and gave you various military problems to solve.

  The officer took us up on a high ridge and said to me, ‘Johnston, you’re in charge of a section on the top of this ridge and approaching a hundred yards away are a squadron of German Tiger tanks. What steps do you take?’

  ‘Bloody long ones, sir,’ I said.

  He didn’t think that was very funny. I was ‘put in the book’ for it and had to do a couple of drills, but in the end I passed out from there and got into the Grenadier Guards.

  Now when you join the Brigade of Guards it is very strange. You go into the mess and they cut you dead for a fortnight. You probably know half of them, so you try and talk with them but no, they turn away. This is evidently to make sure that new boys don’t get too swollen headed.

  After a fortnight is up, they more or less look at their watches and say, ‘Hello, Brian. Are you here? Have a drink!’ and it is all very matey. A bit stupid, I thought, and it happened to me at Shaftesbury when I joined up in 1940.

  But at the same time a friend of mine was joining up down in Sherborne with the Hampshire Regiment and his Commanding Officer treated him completely differently.

  ‘Very glad to have you with us. Want you to get to know people. Want people to get to know you. Monday night we’ll have a thrash in the mess. Lots to drink, never did anybody any harm.’

  My friend said, ‘Terribly sorry, sir, don’t drink.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that then,’ said the Commanding Officer. ‘On Wednesday night we’ll get a few girls up from the NAAFI and have a bit of slap and tickle in the mess. Great fun. You’ll enjoy it.’

  My friend said, ‘Terribly sorry, sir, I don’t approve of that sort of thing.’

  So the Commanding Officer looked at him for a moment and said, ‘Excuse me for asking, but you aren’t by any chance a queer?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said my friend.

  ‘Pity,’ said the CO, ‘then you won’t enjoy Saturday night either!’

  So I actually had a very good war with the Grenadiers, and I only mention them, really, because it is thanks to them (or not) you have had to listen to me, if any of you have, since I joined the BBC in 1946. When we were waiting to go to Normandy, two well-known commentators from the BBC, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and Stewart MacPherson, came to brush up on their war reporting, so I got to know them, which was a bit of luck.

  I got out of the army in 1945. I went to a party and I happened to run into them again. Another bit of luck. They said, ‘We’re very short of people at the BBC because they’re still in the services. We want someone in Outside Broadcasts, we know you can talk a bit, come and have a test.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to join the BBC,’ but they said ‘Come on!’ so I said, ‘All right,’ because I had nothing else to do.

  They set me up in Oxford Street, gave me a microphone and said, ‘Ask passers-by what they think of the butter ration.’ Well, if you ask silly questions, you get silly answers, but what they said was, ‘It wasn’t very good but at least you kept talking. Come and join us for a bit.’

  So I said, ‘I will, but I shan’t stay long.’ That was in January 1946 and funnily enough I was with them until I retired as a member of staff in September 1972, so it suited me, if not everybody who has had to listen to me.

  I remember my first broadcast. I’d only been there about a fortnight when they discovered an unexploded bomb in the lake in St James’s Park. They drained the lake and there was this huge great sausage of a German bomb and it was announced they were going to blow it up at eleven o’clock one morning and my boss said, ‘Right! You can do your first broadcast. You go down there. We’ll interrupt the news and you can describe the blowing up of the bomb.’

  So we went down with the engineers and we were standing on a little bridge when a policeman came up and said, ‘What are you doing?’

  I said, ‘We’re going to commentate on the blowing up of the bomb.’

  ‘Not here, you’re not,’ he said, ‘it’s far too dangerous. Go in there.’ And he pointed to the ladies’ loo.

  So I went in and stood up on the seat and looked through the louvred windows and I did the commentary from there. I always say I came out looking a bit flushed!

  At that time I didn’t have anything to do with cricket at all. But I was so happy, because I loved the theatre and my job was to do radio broadcasts live from musicals like South Pacific, Annie Get Your Gun, Oklahoma and Carousel. I used to commentate from a box and describe anything visual on stage which the listener might not understand. So I got to know all the stars of all the musicals.

  Then every Tuesday we used to go to a music hall [Round the Halls] and broadcast three acts live from there, and I got to know all the variety artists such as Arthur Askey, Tommy Trinder and Jimmy Edwards. So I was absolutely in my seventh heaven.

  It wasn’t until March, two months later, when the telephone rang and a friend of mine called Ian Orr-Ewing, with whom I had played cricket before the war, rang up and said, ‘Help! I am just out of the Royal Air Force, I’m now in charge of sport on television, we’ve got two Test matches this summer against the Indians, at Lord’s and The Oval, and we’ve got no commentator. I know you can play. I know you can talk a bit. Would you like to be the commentator?’

  So, on that little bit of luck, for the next twenty-four years I did all the Test matches on television in this country. After that they got browned off with all my jokes so they sacked me and I went straight across to radio and I’ve been on Test Match Special for another twenty-four years. Just on that one telephone call.

  I did a lot of television and radio in those
days and people often say, ‘Which is the easier of the two?’ Candidly, radio is by far the easier, as long as you’ve got the gift of the gab, powers of description, moderately good English and a reasonable voice. You can be yourself but you have to be the eyes of anybody sitting in an armchair at home or in their car, of blind people, or of someone listening on the beach. You’ve got to paint a picture for them and tell them all you can see, so that they can imagine what it is like.

  That’s the job of a radio commentator but, of course, on television the camera shows all that, so you’ve merely got to dot the i’s and cross the t’s and explain perhaps who someone is if they might not recognise them. You have to edit yourself before you say anything. You think, ‘Shall I speak or shan’t I?’ and to me that is unnatural. We used to have a golden rule which went, ‘Only speak when you can add to the picture’ and I learnt that the hard way.

  In 1954 the Queen and Prince Philip went on a tour of Australia and when they came back the BBC decided to televise their return. They were going to go up as far as the Tower Bridge in the Royal Yacht Britannia, get into a launch and travel up to Westminster Pier where they would come ashore and go back to Buckingham Palace in the Irish State Coach.

  Before these sorts of events you always talk over with your fellow commentator who’s going to say what. Richard Dimbleby was going to be on Westminster Pier, so it was decided that he was going to talk about the people waiting to greet the Queen: the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, the Lord Lieutenant, the corgis and so on, and he would describe her coming ashore.