by Peter Baxter
Now, though, cricket in India was big business and it took until the eve of the second Test to bridge the yawning gap between the fee demanded and that which AIR felt they could afford.
The eventual solving of the crisis, in Chandigarh, did give me a headache. We had been allocated a narrow commentary box there and, as I set up the day before the Test (making the best of limited space to accommodate TMS, Radio 5 Live, the BBC Asian network and a reserve position for reports to Radio 4, Radio Wales and anyone else who needed something) I was told that All India Radio would be arriving in force to do their commentary alongside us. With major communication problems next morning, delicate negotiations for territory with AIR were just an extra problem.
It was there, during a lengthy rain break, that Aggers – in jocular fashion – came out with the time-honoured line, ‘I didn’t get where I am today…’ I reminded him that where he was today was in a cramped pigeon loft in the rain in Chandigarh.
On my first tour to India, the commentary team had been built round Don Mosey, the crotchety Yorkshireman, who did not suffer fools and included anyone either born south of the Trent or privately educated in that category. There were many other targets in his list of hates, which did not leave much leeway.
We started that tour with Tony Lewis sharing the ball-by-ball descriptions. A successful former Glamorgan captain, Tony had also captained England in India in 1972–73 and his radio essay on the subject later for a one-off Radio 4 sports programme had been so good that when the programme’s success had led to the weekly Saturday morning slot, Sport on Four, he became its first presenter. Meanwhile, I had been looking for a few new commentators for the 1979 World Cup and so had tried him out.
After he had joined the radio team, he also did some Tests for television. Changing between the two media is not easy for someone doing the radio ball-by-ball commentary. But Tony coped with this switching back and forwards with a spare method to his commentary and a delightfully observant sense of humour.
Eventually, of course, he did move completely to television, becoming the principal front man for the BBC, but he returned to us for a one-off Test match in Calcutta in the nineties as a summariser. Aggers, not having worked alongside him before, immediately commented on how good he was. During his commentary days, he was also cricket correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph and went on to the presidency of MCC.
We had an Indian commentator with us for the 1981 series in the person of Ashis Ray, an experienced journalist, who had done quite a bit of broadcasting for the BBC World Service. He was to be with us also on the next tour, in 1984–85, as was Tony Lewis, again for the first two Tests.
On later tours of India we have been joined by Harsha Bhogle, whose talents were brought to my attention by the ABC in Australia, when he was part of their team for a series. In Indian broadcasting he has moved on from the haphazard selection of commentators for AIR to a high profile position on television, doing commentary and hosting quiz shows. Indeed, he is such a recognisable figure that when he was with us in India in 2006 we found him being mobbed by fans just as much, if not more, than Sunil Gavaskar.
In 1984, knowing that I was trying to assemble possible commentary teams in advance of the tour of India, I was contacted by Ralph Dellor. I had known him for some time as a competent freelance broadcaster, who used to do a lot of Sunday afternoon commentaries on BBC Radio London. I had used him in the extensive coverage we had mounted on the 1983 World Cup in England and I was therefore confident that he was someone I could rely on.
He asked me if, should he find himself in Madras around the time of the Test match there (he was en route to Sri Lanka at about that time), I would use him in the commentary team. I said that I would – and what a Test match he had for his debut, with England winning in devastating form. He joined us again three years later in Pakistan for the last two Tests, starting with the infamous match in Faisalabad. There he played a crucial role, even getting what was certainly at the time an exclusive interview with the umpire, Shakoor Rana.
Finding ball-by-ball commentators is always more difficult than finding summarisers. The radio commentator is the camera, describing the action as he sees it unfold. The summariser, always a former first-class player, acts more like the television commentator, adding colour to the picture that has been painted. In 1981, we relied – probably too much – on a good relationship with the England dressing room for our summarising effort. The manager, Raman Subba Row, who had played thirteen Tests, encouraged the practice and did several stints himself.
I remember Mike Brearley arriving on the tour as an observer and taking me aside to express his reservations. He felt that it had the potential to put the players in a difficult position. I can certainly appreciate that point of view more now than I could as an anxious producer with a small budget, who had to keep the programme going. Not only might it make things tricky for the players sometimes, but the programme itself might be in danger of becoming sycophantic.
Happily, though, the players seemed to enjoy doing it – most of the time.
Sunday 29 November 1981
We had a stream of willing volunteers from the dressing room to act as summarisers. First came Mike Gatting, followed by the manager, Raman Subba Row, who is turning out to be a natural in this business. Then came Paul Allott and Jack Richards, neither of whom have had much cricket on tour.
All had some insight into the problems of broadcasting here. Mike Gatting’s chair collapsed when he was mid-sentence, while Paul Allott was greeted with a shower of pigeon droppings coming through the roof and then had to chase a jumping spider across the desktop.
Part of the original plan on that tour had been to use the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent, Michael Carey. He was due to make his first appearance for the second one-day international in Jullunder, in the Punjab. However, during the week before, when contact with the UK had been difficult, the BBC’s head of sport and the Telegraph sports editor had managed to have a row and permission to use Carey had been withdrawn by the paper.
The first we knew of this was the telex he received when we arrived in Jullunder the day before the match. It presented something of a problem. I had done some commentaries on the odd Saturday afternoon county match which had been well enough received and so my sharing the burden with Mosey seemed to be the obvious solution. Predictably, Mosey would not hear of it and the hierarchy in London were too scared of their lord of the north to tell him to get on with it.
Instead he talked himself hoarse for the day, while I tried to get a rotation of players from the dressing room to come and mount the rickety ladder to our open platform of a commentary position.
Following this, one of the press, Steve Whiting of the Sun, offered his services as a commentator. Don’s immediate reaction to this was a snort of derision. However, when he started to realise that he might be in danger of having me imposed on him as a co-commentator Don declared him to be perfectly adequate.
Steve made his debut in Cuttack, for the third one-day international, in a most unusual commentary box.
Tuesday 26 January 1982
One feature of the Barabati Stadium was a multi-balconied clocktower at one end. As I walked onto the ground with the players for our first look around, John Lever, came up beside me and muttered drily, ‘And coming in from the lighthouse end …’
I found an official to ask where the commentary boxes were likely to be and he pointed at once to the lighthouse-cum-clocktower. On the third balcony up the tower I found the AIR engineers actually setting up our position. It certainly gave us a splendid view.
A quarter of a century later the clock tower was still there, and still acting as a perch for broadcasters and photographers. It became rather a favourite of mine over the three one-day internationals and a four-day game I covered there on various tours.
My lack of common ground with Don Mosey finally came to a head i
n Colombo, at the end of the tour. We had a very limited commentary team and very limited space too, having been moved from a position where our view had been completely obstructed by a stand. We were now in the front row of the press box.
Henry Blofeld and Tony Lewis had both arrived, just for this Test match. Tony was somewhat surprised to be greeted by Don with, ‘Oh good, we’ve evened up the grammar school/public school balance!’
My proposal was that they could do a rotating shift, each doing a commentary stint and then summarising for the next commentator. Don’s response was that he was good enough not to need a summariser. That was a piece of pomposity too far for me and I told him his fortune, to the huge amusement and enjoyment of the newspapermen looking on. This is what is known as a ‘PBI’ – a press box incident.
My brief without Don in Australia in 1982, during a short period when we had no appointed cricket correspondent, was to raise a commentary team out of those who were already there. Henry Blofeld in those days had a lot of freelance work there every (Australian) summer, so he was inked in first. Christopher Martin-Jenkins was now editor of the Cricketer magazine, but would be in Australia for the first two Tests in that capacity. The pair of them had been ten years in the commentary business even then, both having been involved in TMS for the first one-day internationals in England in 1972. Christopher had made his Test Match debut the following year and Henry in 1974, though he had cut his teeth earlier for a commercial station in the Caribbean.
When assembling that 1982 team, I also naturally went to the veteran Australian commentator, Alan McGilvray.
Alan had started his broadcasting career in 1935, with studio reports on matches in which he was captaining New South Wales. He had been part of the ‘synthetic’ Test commentaries in 1938, which the ABC mounted in a studio in Sydney, based on cables from England, and during which they famously made the sound of bat on ball by tapping a pencil on a block of wood. Then, in 1948, he joined the BBC commentary team covering Bradman’s last tour of England. He missed joining the BBC team in 1953 and 1956, when he was working for a commercial station, but thereafter covered every Ashes Test with us until his retirement in 1985. Such was his status that the ABC used his name in their battle with Channel Nine television as they took over the Australian coverage of Test cricket. A ditty was used: ‘The game is not the same without McGilvray.’
When he retired from broadcasting, the ABC put together as good a trio of commentators as I have come across in Jim Maxwell, Neville Oliver and Tim Lane – all very different in voice and approach, making an ideal contrast with each other.
Jim, a sharp observer with some of his native Sydney’s brashness, has noticeably mellowed over the years. Neville, from Tasmania, was originally considered more of a rowing expert, but as regional Australian sports broadcasters have to be versatile, he found himself doing cricket and the editorial staff liked his style and sent him to England in 1989. There he went down well and, probably it did no harm back home that he was bringing news of an Australian victory. He then became head of sport at ABC radio.
Tim is also originally from Tasmania, but settled in the environs of Melbourne. He was dividing his time on the ABC between cricket and Australian rules football and eventually left the radio to concentrate on the latter for commercial television. In 2011 he took me to my first live AFL game and was patient enough to explain the otherwise totally incomprehensible goings-on. Despite the apparent aggression of that sport, Tim is the gentlest of souls and I was delighted to get him back on TMS for two Tests on the 2006–07 tour of Australia.
In 1982, the ABC generally seemed a bit disappointed that we were not taking their commentary, as we had done in the past. A few individuals quietly asked if there was any sinister reason. I was at pains to make it clear that it was our need to control our own programme, rather than any criticism of them. Alan was happy enough with the arrangement, because he had been irritated on recent tours by having to build the commentary rota round Christopher Martin-Jenkins’ need to make regular reports for Radio 2 on the phone.
The series started in Perth.
Friday 12 November 1982
In the commentary box – an open fronted affair with a high fixed desk across the front for three people to sit side by side – I had recruited the former Surrey and England fast bowler, Peter Loader, as an expert summariser. The general consensus was that he was excellent. Another TMS debutant was Mike Carey. He sounded understandably a little nervous to start with, but had some good touches and seemed to fit in well. Otherwise the faces and voices were familiar – Henry Blofeld; Christopher Martin-Jenkins, who had flown in at midnight the night before and yet seemed to be defying jet-lag; Alan McGilvray, who had to walk round from the luxury of the ABC box at the far end from our perch; Fred Trueman, who was there for Channel Nine television in the air conditioned box above us; and Bill Frindall, setting out his bits and pieces as usual at one end of the desk.
At the end of the day I had a great feeling of satisfaction at a good job done.
So, Michael Carey, forbidden by his paper from joining us the previous winter, was now part of the team. His efforts drew comment from one wife, arriving mid-way through the series, who informed him in a very strong Brummie accent, ‘Yow’re very popular in the machine room at Dunlop.’ It was a compliment to cherish.
He was to continue in our team for the 1983 World Cup and on our next visit to India in 1984–85, where he became my regular partner in the games of Scrabble which whiled away waits for delayed flights and overdue phone calls. Being highly intelligent he was a fearsome opponent. This intelligence also fed a very sharp wit. He regarded each of his reports for the Telegraph as an opportunity to get a joke or a pun past the sub-editors intact.
For instance, a match against India’s East Zone in Gauhati at the end of 1984, featured an Indian player called Das and our own Vic Marks. Carey succeeded in slipping in ‘… stout resistance by Das. Capital bowling by Marks…’ He was triumphant when it got into the paper un-subbed.
Jack Bannister and Tony Lewis also took part in the commentary team on that 1982 Australian tour. Jack had had a 19-year career with Warwickshire as a fast-medium bowler, passing a hundred wickets for the season four times. He once told me that after he retired it took two years before everything stopped hurting. He was another who accomplished both roles as commentator and summariser and also alternated between radio and television for a time.
At the end of that tour, when I had left, he joined the ABC commentary team for the one-day internationals and in Sydney found himself – uncharacteristically – getting the giggles. The summariser with him, describing David Gower’s dismissal, had ventured the opinion that he would have done better to get his leg over more. As Jack put it to me later, ‘I was like a rabbit in the headlights.’ ‘Wouldn’t we all?’ he said. Years before the Johnston/Agnew debacle, it was heard on Australian radio. Subsequently, after his time on BBC television, Jack was at the heart of the Talk Sport commentary team.
Before that 1982 Australian tour I had heard the former Australian Test batsman, Paul Sheahan, doing commentary on television. It seemed to be a one-off and as a television commentary it was not quite right. I knew why – it was a perfect radio commentary. Paul was then a housemaster at Geelong Grammar School not far from Melbourne. When I got in touch with him he was only available for the Boxing Day Test at the MCG, but that was where he qualified to wear the TMS tie.
It became my practice to take a couple of the ties with the crossed bats and lightning flash motif with me on tour in case of debut appearances. It had been created in the 1950s as the Test match broadcasters’ tie, worn by television and radio commentators on the first day of a Test match. It fell into disuse among our TV colleagues and just became known as the TMS tie.
There was a touching little ceremony in the rather gloomy bar of the Park Hotel, Calcutta in 1987, when Tim Rice, after two commentaries on
World Cup matches, was presented with his. It might not have meant as much to him as his Oscars, but he seemed quite pleased.
The demands from all BBC outlets from a Test match are extensive these days. Explaining this to foreign cricket authorities is usually difficult. They tend to think one radio organisation means one commentary box. On my early tours, I would get away with a commentary position and a telephone for reports for Radio 2 and Radio 4. In India and Pakistan, where no amount of trying to pre-book a telephone seemed to work, it was always a case of finding the telegraph office or the secretary’s office. In Australia it was refreshing to find that if you booked a phone, there was a man waiting to see where you wanted it installed.
With England having won back the Ashes in 2005, I knew that the demands of all BBC networks from Australia in 2006–07 would be prodigious. I also knew that, for all the size of Australian grounds, the press and broadcasting facilities are limited. I was despatched for a whirlwind tour round the five Test venues, which was a worthwhile exercise, if only to explain the size of our operation these days.
Perth had long since been improved to a set of roomy commentary boxes high in the Lillee/Marsh Stand. Even then, while that meant that all other reports could be accommodated at the back of that box, Radio 5 Live had to be on a floor below in a cordoned-off section of a hospitality suite.
The boxes in Adelaide, since we moved from our 1982 elevated Portakabin, have been small and shut in behind thick, tinted glass, a long way from the action. So small was our usual one, that the summariser would sit on the step behind the commentator and scorer.
It was while commentating in here in 1998 that I was handed by Jonathan Agnew, after a phone call from London, a list of the leaders in some golf tournament that was going on. Apparently some misguided editor was keen that we should give this news. No sooner did I have it in my hand than Aggers snatched it back, to scribble another name on the list. Thus, when it returned to me, I discovered that Hugh Jarce was one under par – an old commentary box joke.
