Can Anyone Hear Me?

by Peter Baxter

  Monday 26 February

  As I was going in to breakfast, I got a call to say that Don Bradman had died during the night. I got onto the sportsroom in London immediately to tell them where to find all the pre-prepared obituary material.

  Despite England losing the Test that day by an innings, a large part of our evening programme was naturally devoted to the passing of the great man.

  In the days before the next Test Match in Kandy, our rights man in London did his stuff with WSG, the firm holding the broadcast rights on behalf of the Sri Lankan board, and all was confirmed as being in order, a state of affairs that was still not accepted by the board’s own media people.

  Late on the afternoon before the Test they seemed to have been told that they had no option but to accept us and their final throw was to get me to re-do our accreditation forms, which had originally been submitted from London months before.

  One plus was that, as we were staying in the team hotel and broadcasting our TMS Report programme from a terrace of the rambling hillside buildings, we had the chance to get players live on the programme occasionally.

  Thursday 8 March

  During the day a man came to our reporting position above the press box and introduced himself as the marketing manager of the Sri Lankan Cricket Board. He was almost apologetic about what had happened to us. Could there be a change of strategy and a realisation that their public relations had been appalling?

  For the evening’s programme we had Duncan Fletcher on. He was very good with Aggers and possibly even better, because, as we were starting, so did the world’s worst bagpiper on a terrace below us. Duncan, normally famous for being so taciturn, got the giggles.

  With England winning the Test in Kandy to square the three-match series, we wanted to get the captain, Nasser Hussain, on TMS Report in the evening live. However, with a fairly early finish, the team decided to set off for the drive down to Colombo immediately. So Aggers recorded him as if it was live, leaving spaces for other interviews and highlights to be played in. I took everything back to the hotel to edit it all together, with the sound of the birds round the gardens there mixed in and was quite pleased with the relaxed sound it made.

  Ever since the visit from the marketing manager, everyone from the Sri Lankan board had been surprisingly friendly again. And so it continued for the final Test in Colombo, which England won, to take the series.

  On the day before the match I ran into one of the media managers.

  Wednesday 14 March

  I was anxious and so I asked Vrai, ‘Are we going to have any problems this time?’

  ‘Only,’ she said, ‘in the matter of …’, and my heart started to sink, ‘… location.’ It seemed the spot she had selected was not the one the club had earmarked for us.

  We have ended up on a precarious platform above a stairwell, which allows little space, but I have certainly worked in worse.

  The three one-day internationals followed the Test series. The first of these was at a ground which had taken six months to build from virgin jungle. This was at Dambulla, in the centre of the island and was very much the brainchild of the board president. It seemed the day before the game that, with builders still busy, it could not possibly be ready.

  I was allocated a broadcasting booth which was completely sealed in, so, to avoid it sounding like a basement bathroom, I had to find a way to worm a cable through the air conditioning duct to deploy an effects microphone.

  A great deal of effort went into making the ground look good for television. Extra spectators were bussed in and an elephant was spotted casually grazing in the jungle beyond the boundary. The fact that it was in the same spot several hours later suggested that it just might be tethered.

  Unfortunately, when a difficult day came to an end with Sri Lanka winning the day-night game, the power for the stadium was turned off shortly afterwards. Completing the TMS Report in total darkness was an interesting exercise, but luckily experience had taught me always to have a torch in my kit bag.

  England lost the next game, too, at the Premadasa Stadium in Colombo, where I spotted a large rat symbolically scuttling out of the commentary box, just as the last wicket went down. At the SSC ground Sri Lanka made the one-day series a whitewash.

  The following British winter would take England to Australia in an attempt to recapture the Ashes. The Australian Cricket Board, by contrast with those of South Africa, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, kept the negotiations for the UK radio rights above board, but eventually the depth of the BBC purse was simply not enough, particularly for a series that is, after all, played through the night in UK time.

  The story came to us from inside Talk Sport that their boss, Kelvin McKenzie, the former editor of the Sun, had failed to realise that the Australians had the bad sense to play cricket in the middle of the night. When he did find out, we were told, he was quite keen to unload the coverage of a series for which it was difficult to sell enough advertising to cover the huge rights fee he had agreed.

  Whatever the details, we did manage to take on that coverage after all.

  During the summer of 2003, the secretary of the West Indies Cricket Board of Control visited the Test Match Special box at Edgbaston. He assured us that all was well with our rights for the broadcasting of the England tour of the Caribbean in the early months of the following year.

  Thus it was a considerable surprise to find nearer the time that his marketing manager had apparently done a different deal behind his back and that Talk Sport would be doing the commentary to the UK. Our protests at sharp practice fell on deaf – if slightly embarrassed – ears.

  The irony of this was that Geoff Boycott had now rejoined the BBC team from Talk for the coverage of this tour. So now he would be part of another series of the TMS Report programme.

  In the run-up to the first Test, the Sun correspondent told us that he had been ordered to write a piece on how we were to be forced to cover the Tests from outside the ground. It seemed an aggressive as well as inaccurate start, particularly as the same day we had our confirmation from the West Indies board that our limit was three minutes an hour – reporting from inside the ground.

  Three days before the Test, to preview the series, we put on a live programme for Radio 5 Live at a golf club in Jamaica, where the team sponsors, Vodafone, were staging a ‘players vs. press’ golf tournament. I set Aggers and Geoffrey up on the clubhouse veranda and procured players and journalists for them to talk to as they came off the course.

  That worked well, but, with the time difference in the West Indies – and particularly Jamaica – it was going to be a very tight deadline for the evening programmes during the Tests.

  Five Live also asked for a daily live chat with Geoff Boycott during their Drive programme. As this would exceed our three minutes an hour on its own, I had to find a position to broadcast outside the ground. A primary school yard just outside the gates of Sabina Park looked the best bet for the first Test and the head teacher was pleased to help.

  Thursday 11 March 2004

  At lunch I set up the satellite dish in the street for Drive to do a two-way with Geoffrey. We performed under the stern gaze of an enormous woman selling patties with rice and peas and jerk chicken. Fortunately we were not asked to repeat this exercise at tea.

  Eventually, it was decided that, if these updates were confined to intervals, they did not count in our hourly allocation, so thereafter we were able to do the contributions from our box.

  One problem we have in the Caribbean in the brave new world of digital communications is that generally they operate on an American system, which is not compatible with that in Europe. In the days before the series started, I worked closely with the Talk Sport freelance engineer, to get hold of the necessary box to make the conversion. Then he had to teach me how to use it.

  In South Africa, Pakistan and Sri Lanka I had started
TMS Report with a signature tune that had something to do with where we were. Here in the West Indies I decided to do something that Aggers had suggested to me five years earlier, when BBC Television lost the rights to broadcast Test cricket. Their signature tune had for years been the familiar ‘Soul Limbo’, by Booker T and the MGs. Aggers reckoned that we should have taken it over straight away.

  My view was that we should leave a little space and not seem to be hanging on television’s coat-tails. But now, I felt, was the right time. Apart from anything else, it has a Caribbean sound to it. It also had a sort of ‘BBC brand’ sound about it, which was important in our current situation. So, ‘Soul Limbo’ was first used by Test Match Special for its highlights programme on 11 March 2004 and it has been used ever since.

  After having to do our own ‘stop/start’ recorded commentaries to compile highlights in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, for this tour I reached agreements with the local stations around the islands, who were employing Vic Marks and Christopher Martin-Jenkins to supplement their teams. Aggers was too tied up with his reporting duties for Radio 5 Live to be available for this, a situation that did not improve his humour at the loss of commentary rights. So, on each ground, I would run a cable from the local station’s commentary position to record and edit my highlights for the evening.

  There were still the interviews to gather for the programme, which, with only the two of us, fell to me. On every West Indian Test ground the dressing rooms are at the far end from the media, a factor that added to the pressure of time. I ran the highlights together in a package for each session, to keep it simple in case I was not back in time for the programme, and Aggers could press each carefully labelled button if necessary.

  In the middle of the second Test in Trinidad, however, we ran into the perfect storm. A late finish was followed by problems with the satellite – no ISDN in Trinidad – and then a power failure. TMS Report did not go out that evening.

  Monday 22 March 2004

  Aggers went on at the scheduled end of TMS Report to do a short piece, give the scores and apologise for a technical failure. I was appalled to hear that the announcer had not said anything about the problem at the start, but had just introduced the next programme on Radio 4 FM.

  I felt utterly suicidal about the whole business. Back at the hotel, Aggers and I just sat, having a beer. Almost the worst thing was that none of the useless hierarchy of the BBC have rung to enquire what went wrong.

  Eventually, after some prompting, the management verdict was that had I not had to be off at the other end of the ground gathering an interview with the day’s hero, Simon Jones, I might have been able to sort out the technical problem.

  That was, I suppose, flattering, even if it was not accurate. The solution was to despatch Simon Mann, who was due to be with us in a fortnight anyway for the one-day internationals, to be our close-of-play interviewer. It was an extravagance, perhaps, but once he joined us in Barbados I found a great deal more for him to do.

  Happily, the day after this debacle, the Test Match finished in a very early win for England and we were able to do the programme from the hotel – recorded well in advance, for safety.

  One of the features of any Caribbean tour has been the beach party at Tony Cozier’s holiday shack on the rugged east coast of Barbados. In the days leading up to it he seems to invite just about everyone he bumps into. Fortunately, perhaps, finding the place after a drive across the island through the narrow lanes that separate the cane fields is usually so tricky that the numbers actually attending are whittled down.

  On this occasion, following the successful programme from the golf club in Jamaica before the first Test, Five Live decided they would like another one from the Cozier party. With England two-up in the Caribbean, with two to play, it seemed a good time. And so, in the unlikely surroundings of the scrub round Tony and Gillian’s wooden chalet, we mounted a Five Live programme.

  Monday 29 March

  It was surely a first for Cozier’s garden. When we had done, we could enjoy the party – Banks beer, flying fish sandwiches and all – before Victor’s slightly less successful navigating of the return journey in the dark.

  For the Barbados Test we were allocated a splendidly situated, spacious commentary box, which was, in fact, rather better than the one that Talk Sport had. We only had three days of Test cricket, which was hurried towards its end by a Matthew Hoggard hat-trick. It meant that next day Aggers could meet all his Sunday morning broadcasting requirements from the relative comfort of my hotel balcony – on his birthday.

  The Recreation Ground in Antigua was less accommodating, providing only a seat in the press box for Aggers to operate from, and from there we had to do our programme. My perch on a camera gantry to record and edit the commentary for highlights was even less comfortable, roasted by a fierce Caribbean sun. So it was perhaps a test on the nerves that the match went to five days.

  It had been a huge disappointment to us when we discovered that Talk Sport’s deal with South Africa was for two tours. Since they first started to mount their commentaries, we had only had the overseas rights for India and New Zealand in 2001–02 and, when Talk had backed out, Australia in 2002–03. We had also covered the World Cup in South Africa, because our contract for that was with the ICC, rather than the South African board. But I had heard the remark that the BBC didn’t cover overseas cricket tours and had to handle angry correspondence demanding to know why we had decided to stop doing so, and that sort of thing really hurt.

  At least by the 2004–05 South African tour there was something of a formula to Test Match Special Report, which involved a bit of Agnew/Boycott banter – a forerunner of their close-of-play podcasts. We still took our commentary for highlights from the SABC, though some of their recent recruits were given to the sort of flights of fancy that made editing of the clips an interesting exercise.

  Not much had changed for the first Test venue, Port Elizabeth, or the second at Durban. At Cape Town we found ourselves at the back of the large, but hermetically sealed, press box built for the 2003 World Cup. This posed a difficult problem for the sound of a broadcast, but with every piece of cable I could lay my hands on I found a fire escape door out of which I could run an effects microphone.

  The series was a crucial part of England’s progress towards the dramatic summer of 2005.

  They had come to South Africa at the end of a very good year. They had started it by beating the West Indies three-nil in the Caribbean. Then they won all seven Tests at home, against New Zealand and the West Indies. So they set off for South Africa with ten Test wins and one draw already under their belts for the year. At the beginning of December they made it eleven, thanks to their new recruit, Andrew Strauss, who made 126 and 94 not out in a seven-wicket win at Port Elizabeth.

  In Durban they got themselves out of a mess, to see South Africa hanging on for the draw at the end. They were soundly beaten in Cape Town a few days later in the New Year Test.

  So they came to the Wanderers in Johannesburg one-all, with the momentum thought to have swung to the hosts. Here we were allocated a splendid vacant hospitality box, though I spent the time there thinking that someone would find they had made a mistake and evict us. But what a Test Match we witnessed from our lofty perch.

  On the first day, Strauss made his third hundred of the series – 147. On a second day curtailed by the weather, a rollicking unbroken ninth-wicket stand of 82, of which Harmison had made an unlikely 30, took England past 400. In my close-of-play interview with him, Michael Vaughan, himself 82 not out, said: ‘Don’t rule out an overnight declaration.’ And that’s what he did – at 411 for eight.

  A big hundred from Herschelle Gibbs made sure that South Africa took a lead, but only one of eight runs, with the England attack being carried by Matthew Hoggard, who took five wickets in his 34 overs.

  England were batting again before lunch on the fourth
day and were 189 ahead with five wickets in hand at the end of it, with Marcus Trescothick 101 not out. When he was out for 180, shortly before lunch on the last day, Vaughan declared again at 332 for nine, setting South Africa 325 to win in 68 overs, though bad light had set in every evening of the match and so was likely to curtail that.

  Through the afternoon Hoggard, swinging the ball prodigiously, was magnificent. In his second over after lunch he had de Villiers lbw. Two overs later he bowled Rudolph and had Kallis caught at slip. It was eighteen for three and now there were jitters in the South African camp. They also had the handicap of having their captain, Graeme Smith, laid up, having been concussed by a ball in the morning’s fielding practice.

  At last Boeta Dippenaar stayed with Gibbs for a little over an hour, as they added 62. But then Hoggard was back to claim two more wickets in successive overs. Dippenaar was caught at gully for fourteen and Mark Boucher, just back in the side, was caught behind for a duck. It was 86 for five and Hoggard had all five of them.

  Straight after tea, he claimed his sixth, by catching Boje off his own bowling. At that point the South African captain had seen enough and, despite doctor’s orders, he came in to bat at 118 for six. There were theoretically 35 overs still to be bowled, but the fickle High Veldt weather was a factor not to be ignored, so England’s race against time was all the more urgent and South Africa had something to bat for.

  Gibbs and Smith more than hung on for another ten overs, before Giles had Gibbs lbw for 98. Three overs later Flintoff had Shaun Pollock dropped and then caught at the wicket next ball. With England in all-out attack, the runs flowed, but Smith now had the tail with him. In the 53rd over, Ntini was lbw to Flintoff and at ten to six, with eight and a half overs left in the match, Hoggard returned to have Steyn caught behind. Smith was left with a valiant 67 not out to his name.