The producers and administrators I left behind could sometimes be small-minded. Angus’s chief antagonist was the courteous but dour South African Jacob De Vries, who saw me as someone more suited to the tradition of Brian Johnston, Raymond Baxter and the rest of the early denizens of sports broadcasting. When Angus was on his summer holiday and De Vries took over temporary responsibility for the Saturday sports output I was asked to present both the live coverage during the afternoon and Sports Report itself. Looking back, that was quite an honour but I did so only in the short gaps between football seasons.
Bryon Butler, with his honeyed voice, and the earnest and conscientious John Motson were other highly professional performers, as were Derek Thompson and Gerald Williams, passionate respectively about racing and tennis; and the engaging Scotsman Bill Hamilton, who somehow kept going one sunny summer afternoon even as all the lunchtime cricket scoreboard scripts were being blown round the studio after a sudden gust of wind through the open window.
A pair of Scottish rugger internationals, Chris Rea and Ian Robertson, also joined the Sports Room not long after me. At one stage of their careers they were fortunate enough to find a wealthy Roman businessman who had become enthusiastic about his rugby. They would take a flight to Rome every Saturday night to play for his club there the following day, for rather better recompense than their BBC employment offered them.
Both were excellent broadcasters and fun to be with. Like me, both also enjoyed a game of golf on days off. Chris, always inclined to be irascible, became frustrated by his bosses and has had various jobs in rugby since, not to mention one as a slightly unlikely Press Relations chief for MCC, helped by his acquaintanceship with the then secretary, Roger Knight. Their respective wives were old friends.
Ian is a funny man either in conversation or on his feet after dinner. His gravelly commentaries still make Rugby Union come alive on radio and he remains a passionate follower of racing. He persuaded me to take a twelfth share of a syndicate that bought a quarter share in a horse trained and co-owned by the royal trainer Ian Balding. The former rugby international Ben Michaelson had another quarter share. Most of the members of the group of twelve persuaded by ‘Robbo’ to part with rather less of their money were also rugger players, so the horse was named Twickenham.
We were told by Robbo, a most conscientious syndicate secretary who would write us all witty summaries of the horse’s progress from time to time, that, even if our handsome but modestly bred chestnut was no good, the great advantage was that we would get inside tips from the stable every week that would make us all a small fortune. Most of them, of course, were hopeless – none worse than those from the trainer himself who, masterly as he was with his most famous horse, Mill Reef, predicted the result of races involving his own stables about as accurately as Michael Fish did hurricanes. On the other hand Twickenham turned out to be a willing stayer and when he was released (gelded by then, unfortunately) to peaceful retirement in California, he had won eleven races over five years, despite a blank year as a three-year-old when he got a virus and had to be nursed back to fitness by Terry Biddlecombe. He made us all, after all the regular expenses, a profit of exactly ten shillings, which is ten shillings more than most of those who invest in racehorses. It was great fun to go into the paddock with an owner’s badge on but it was my luck that on the few occasions I was able to see him run Twickenham never finished better than fourth.
Nigel Starmer-Smith, the former Oxford and England scrum-half, was a third ex-international in the Sports Room at the time. A charming man, later to suffer tragedy with his lovely wife, Ros, when two of their three children died in their teens from the same rare disease, he could also be a nervous broadcaster, especially when not in his own area of expertise. ‘Comfort zone’ is the apt sporting cliché. Asked to round up one half of the day’s highlights in county cricket on the evening sports programme one day (I was doing the other one) Nigel was so uptight that he started on the second page of his script, beginning in the middle of a sentence and therefore responding to his introduction with something like ‘taking six for 74 to bowl Derbyshire out for 198’. A little non-plussed, like everyone, by this surprising beginning to his report Nigel became the only man in my experience actually to utter the words: ‘I’m sorry, I’ll read that again.’
Years later Nigel was the chief commentator while I was happily watching a rugby international from Twickenham on the sofa at home, with a log fire adding to my feeling of well being. To my momentary horror I heard Steve Ryder, the link-man, saying to the millions of other viewers at the end of half-time: ‘Let’s get back to the action now. Your commentator for the start of the second half is Christopher Martin-Jenkins.’
The most famous rugby player on the staff, however, and presumably the man who encouraged the employment of all these estimable men, was Cliff Morgan. Alas, I never saw him play fly-half for Wales or the British Lions, except on black and white film clips. But I knew him as a lyrical commentator on the game who had recovered from a serious stroke in his forties to continue his regular contributions to radio sports programmes. He was also a deeply knowledgeable rugby TV commentator before Robert Hudson encouraged his appointment as his own successor as head of Radio Sport. Cliff thus became my boss, not long after I had been made cricket correspondent.
He was different from the restrained and dignified Hudson. Cliff acted by instinct in life, with fire in his belly and passion in his heart. He would have phrased that differently: ‘You’ve got to speak from the balls, boy’ he would say. He was probably happier broadcasting than managing, but that was the way of the BBC. The best paid jobs were ‘inside’ and no doubt he needed the money. I was grateful when he backed me following a complaint from the Director General of the ABC about something that I had written as a guest writer in a newspaper column during a tour of Australia. I was very worried at the time by the possible repercussions but, having established the facts, Cliff simply said: ‘pompous ass. Remember, boy, you can get away with anything if you’ve got class.’ He did not mean class in the social sense, so, given the source, it was one of the best compliments I have ever had.
He had a good sense of humour, too. Norman Cuddeford, a regular free-lance athletics commentator who also loved his cricket, had made an embarrassing but very funny faux pas during the sports slot on the Today programme when, thinking he was just doing a microphone test rather than actually live on the air, he responded by replying to Chris Rea’s question ‘Can you bring us up to date with the latest score, Norman?’ by replying: ‘No, I’m awfully sorry, I can’t.’
The incident occurred in 1975 shortly before the Montreal Olympics. Naturally it brought an abject apology from Norman, who added: ‘I hope this won’t affect my chances of going to Montreal.’ Cliff feigned fury: ‘Montreal?’ he said. ‘You’ll be lucky if you go to the bloody Albert Hall!’
Wise as he was, Cliff knew that no one makes mistakes on the air on purpose, and also that, nine times out of ten, they bring unexpected joy to listeners or viewers.
I spent far less time in the Sports Room once I had broken through as cricket correspondent but life was generally fun there and has been ever since, I think, for the long succession of reporters who have followed, many from local radio and these days servicing listeners to Radio Five Live. They are heavily biased towards football, which the likes of Mike Ingham, Alan Green, and the charming north-easterner John Murray, who once bobbed up on a cricket tour in Sri Lanka, cover very well indeed, although Green, like anyone who proclaims his opinions loudly, is not everyone’s cup of tea. Would that more of them were interested in cricket but football, especially since the arrival of the pernicious Premier League, tends to swallow all in its over-hyped wake. Arlo White, a confident, professional and personable all-round broadcaster, managed to straddle both sports for a time before going free-lance. The amiable Johnny Saunders and the capable Mark Saggers, both knowledgeable cricket-lovers, have moved away from the game for the time being because of a lack o
f opportunity and poor Kevin Howell and Alison Mitchell, who handle such coverage of county cricket as there is on Five Live, get all too little air-time.
That is a case of plus ça change. In my time on the staff live coverage of county cricket on Saturdays became limited to frustratingly inadequate one minute or thirty second reports. The failure of producers to realise that a vast silent corps of interested cricketers yearned for more was one of the things that drove me back to The Cricketer in 1981, but as I shall explain later that was an argument that I never won.
Desmond and I had been taken on originally to share presentation duties for the new sports slot on the Today programme, then introduced each morning, to a devoted audience, by Jack de Manio and John Timpson. De Manio, more popular in his day than John Humphrys and James Naughtie combined, was urbane, avuncular and apparently a bumbling amateur, but that was a part of his charm. He was famous for getting the time wrong. I liked him immensely and he seemed also to favour me as someone who spoke the Queen’s English, had a proper respect for his elders and provided five minutes of light variation from the heavier political stories at twenty-five minutes past six, seven and eight each weekday morning. The formula has stood the test of time.
When, shortly before my marriage in 1971, I broke two toes in my right foot by dropping a paving stone onto them, De Manio found humour in my discomfort. Seeing me enter the studio with crutches during the first edition he somehow armed himself with a brick before my second appearance and dropped it with a sickening thud in front of my microphone by way of explanation.
I liked John Timpson too. He was sharp, acerbic and professional but had little interest in sport. Nor, come to think of it, did most of their successors in the high-profile roles of Today presenters. In my time I worked also with the delightful and admirably competent Sue MacGregor; the splendidly pontifical Robert Robinson, who always seemed to be operating on a plane far above the trivial world of sport; the forthright, politically-minded Brian Redhead, who died sadly young, and Libby Purves, yet another outstanding talent. Few Times columnists write more sensibly and lucidly than she. The high standards have been kept up to this day, most notably by Naughtie and John Humphrys, who is not everyone’s favourite but with whom I invariably seem to see eye to eye. He is a wonderful communicator and, despite roughing up politicians as they have seldom been since the days of the inquisitorial Sir Robin Day (once, as I shall relate, my guest on Test Match Special) he strikes me as being both fair and humane.
Although I miss Ed Stourton, the current team maintains the high standard. I took part in a fund-raising dinner for the Lord Mayor’s charities at Guildhall in the City in 2010 with ‘one of the newer fellahs’, Justin Webb. He is exemplary in that he does not impose his personality unnecessarily and proves, as the best of his predecessors did, that it is possible to be firm with political interviewees without being rude to them. He has lost no dignity since revealing himself to be the ‘love-child’ of the normally professional Peter Woods, who became even more famous for appearing in a tired and emotional state to read a late evening news bulletin on BBC2, before Robin Day, with a wry smile, announced that ‘Newsnight is starting rather earlier than usual’. Woods had been cut off for slurring his words and telling us that the balance of payments situation was . . . (after several unavailing attempts to get out the word on his autocue) . . . ‘awfully bad’. His problem was ascribed to a reaction to taking medicine for sinus problems. Like Lt. Commander Tommy Woodrooffe when the fleet was lit up at the 1937 Spithead Review it was bad for his career but certainly not for his popularity.
Curiously, I can remember only two instances of an inebriated broadcaster being obviously unable to give of his best. One was a radio newsreader, quite unable to read his bulletin during one of those countless sports programmes – it was hilarious to me, and, happily, I think he was forgiven on the promise of no repeat performance. The other was the multi-talented Alan Gibson, for whom, as I shall explain later, the consequences were, unfortunately, immediate.
Being part of the Today programme involved night shifts, which, for my constitution anyway, was wearying. I would leave Judy at home at Pilgrim’s Cottage in Albury and travel to London in her little green Hillman Imp (I had never owned a car, having previously driven my father’s black Morris Minor – numberplate 7381 U). The Imp being even more liable to break down, I went more often by the Tillingbourne Valley bus to Guildford, then by train, tube and foot to Broadcasting House.
Once there one would prepare first for a ‘sports desk’ in the middle of an evening programme on Radio Two called Late Night Extra, which ran for many years introduced by a number of presenters including the charming and intelligent John Dunn (a giant of a man physically); the super smooth music specialists David Jacobs and Brian Matthew; Bob Holness, who became better known on television; and ‘Diddy’ David Hamilton, a jaunty little chap with a twinkle in his eye. To a man they were highly polished performers.
By the time this job had been done, at 10.30 or thereabouts, the Sports Room was like an abandoned ship, brightly lit (as Commander Woodrooffe would have confirmed) but empty of all life. Isolated in the large, garishly-lit room, and keeping an eye out for late evening news chattering through on the teleprinters, I would slave for several hours in an attempt to make the most of my three sports slots the following morning, editing tapes with razor blades and yellow chinagraph pencils. Precious time could always be saved from any interview or report by taking out ums, urs, repetitions and even breaths. It was a skill at which I became quite adept, despite my natural hamfistedness, but there was always the dangerous possibility that the white tape, sticky on one side, that joined the two pieces of tape together at the various edits, might come apart when the tape passed through the machines as the programmes went out live.
When everything had been sorted out and my script had been typed on one of the enormous typewriters that sat on top of most of the desks (always allowing room for ad libs when it came to broadcasting live) I would go over the road to the BBC Club at Langham Place and sign in to a stuffy, harshly-lit room for what was never more than a few hours of fitful sleep. An alarm would go at about 5.30. After a quick shave (a discipline to which I always adhere no matter where I am) it was back to BH for a quick bulletin after the Six, followed by the main appearances at 7.25 and 8.25.
The great advantage of being assigned to Today, apart from the fact that there was a large, influential and intelligent audience, was that one enjoyed editorial control over what was included. When I was on duty those interested in cricket – and to a lesser extent rugby and golf – probably had more than their fair share. They get less than they should nowadays, unless the balanced Rob Bonnet is on duty. The popular Gary Richardson enjoys a good cricket controversy and, like all who are not really interested in cricket, he has registered that any Ashes series is ‘big’, so has to be given the full treatment. He is certainly not alone in underselling other series and the game at below international level and I do not blame Gary personally. I greatly like his sense of humour, but rather deplore his down-market idea of what a Radio Four audience wants.
In summer especially it was also nice to get back home for a late breakfast and have the rest of the day to oneself. I would go to bed during the day only if I had another duty that evening, but doing three days a week of night shifts was like living with permanent mild jet-lag.
9
TEST MATCH SPECIAL – COMMENTATORS
I am in my last year at school, hoping for guidance along the path to the fulfilment of a youthful ambition. I have written to Brian Johnston asking him how I might possibly become a cricket commentator. He has invited me to Broadcasting House at Portland Place, up the road from Oxford Circus. Nervously I have found my way through the maze of corridors (they took years to get to know) to the office in the OB department that he shares with Raymond Baxter. The walls are lined with ‘naughty’ seaside postcards, most of them, I suppose, by Donald McGill, which give an immediate indication of h
ow seriously he takes life. Being Brian, he relaxes me at once. It is my first encounter with the bubbly charm, rosy cheeks and famously large nose that will lift my spirits every time I am in his company in the years ahead.
Raymond, with his crinkly hair, equally prominent nose and distinctive, authoritative voice, is no less familiar a face to me. He, too, gives me a jovial welcome before Brian guides me over the road to the BBC Club for a convivial sandwich lunch, I drinking a beer, Brian his favourite glass of Muscadet-sur-Lie. He simply tells me to practise commentating by myself with a tape recorder and to play and watch as much as possible, advice I have handed on since to many an aspiring youngster including Mark Pougatch, who has made better use of it than most.
The BBC in the 1970s, and I dare say as much so now, was a vast bureaucracy. My file from those days contained any number of administrative memoranda, many about what was and what was not allowed to be spent when away from Broadcasting House on duty. £18.82 for an overnight hotel stay and 14.4 pence per gallon of petrol seem a little out of date now. Amongst these dusty archives, however, are one or two letters and memos that remind me how vigorously I pursued my ambition to become a cricket commentator.
The internal political divide between OBs and ‘Sports News’ made it harder for me to get a foot into the door of the coveted Test match commentary box but I pressed with as much tact as I could for a commentary test and was given one at The Oval in August 1970. I had already been to a few county matches that season to report for the various Saturday programmes, starting with one for the World Service at the Surrey/Yorkshire match in May when Chris Old dismissed Stuart Storey early on the Saturday morning. I duly concluded my first dispatch with the words ‘it’s been a good morning so far for young Old’, to which Paddy Feeny, the long-serving presenter of World Service sport, responded: ‘Oh, really; I used to know his father, Old Young.’ Later that day came my first commentary audition. After plenty of practice on a tape recorder, and years of ‘pretend’ commentaries as a child, it seemed quite natural to me. Rex Alston, Brian’s predecessor as cricket correspondent, supervised the audition, which simply meant guiding me to the microphone, withdrawing tactfully and leaving me to it for the next twenty minutes.
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