Peter West signs off

Peter West interviews Imran Khan © Getty Images

Peter West is 66 this month and he has taken that as his cue to retire from television cricket. I would not argue with his timing, because "Westy" never misses a cue - he is a master of talking to the camera while, through an earpiece, obeying the second-by-second countdown. He will have got it right. He will have met the junction for the next programme perfectly, which, by the way, is tending his Cotswold garden, where bad light never stops play, where the only balcony interview will be with his wife Pauline, and where there is only one question: "Red or white, darling?"

Peter West has been so much part of our lives, and yet his very skill in presenting cricket and interviewing players has revealed a mass about others but little about himself.

Just in case you need confirmation from someone who has worked alongside Westy for 25 of his 35 seasons of television cricket, I quote Richie Benaud: "Peter is one of the finest professionals I have ever seen or with whom I have had the pleasure of working. Sometimes faced by chaotic situations, often brought about by hours of bad light or rain, he handles them calmly - an object lesson to me when I took over a similar presentation job with Channel 9 in Australia."

Peter was born in Addiscombe, Surrey. He was only four when his father retired early from the oil business to live in some splendour on 30 acres of the Kentish Weald at Cranbrook. Unfortunately, West senior lost every penny of his fortune in the slump of 1931; he was forced to sell up and trudge back to the City. In those pre-Jeffrey Archer days, recovery was long and arduous.

Young West, 11 years old now, came to the aid of the family by winning a scholarship to Cranbrook School, but he was already dreaming of the cricketers he had seen on the old Angel Ground at Tonbridge when he and the lads of Yardley Court Prep School were treated to the frequent sight of st Ames b Freeman. He saw Woolley bat and Percy Chapman and wondered at the style and self-confidence of BH Valentine.

However, it was another Mr Chapman, not APF, who taught Peter West his young cricket: this was his father's farm manager. At Cranbrook, other games attracted, and Peter won his cap in five sports - cricket, rugby, hockey, athletics and fives. The sad history is that bad luck had not finished with the Wests. When he was 16, Peter began to have pains in the back. It was not long before he became a victim of the recurring family ailment spondylitis, the inflammation of the vertebrae. A rugby cap was his greatest hope, because his richest talent was in that game, but at 19 he had to stop playing.

Off to Sandhurst in August 1939, a 19-year-old subaltern in the Duke of Wellington's. In 1944 Captain West was invalided out of the service after spending 18 months in hospitals undergoing deep X-rays of the back.

How did he become a broadcaster and writer on sport, a job which is the envy of millions who toil away, nine to five every day? It was not a job on the career list at school. First he worked for SSAFA, the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen Families Association. He was sacked. "I deserved it, but I got them back: I stole their secretary Pauline. I married her." Then he got the job he wanted, as a general sports reporter with the Exchange Telegraph on the 1945 NUJ minimum wage of five guineas a week. The next, sudden surge upwards came in an astonishing way.

The scene was the press box at Taunton in 1947. He had been chatting away to the distinguished gentleman in the back row who represented the Sunday Graphic. Ever eager to please, the cub West inquired of the man - whom he knew to be over 70 - "Can I phone your copy for you, sir?" He did. The old man was grateful and asked an odd question. "Ever thought of being a radio commentator?"

"No, sir."

"Looking for new voices. I'll send your name in."

What Peter West did not admit to the old gentleman, who, by the way, was CB Fry, was that he had already failed a newsreading audition at the BBC. He had got tense and nervous and hardly got a clear word out. However, when Fry turned out to be every bit as good as his word, he returned to Broadcasting House to meet a man who looked 8ft tall, who had a devastatingly clear and analytical mind, SJ de Lotbiniere.

His test was given by Rex Alston. Six weeks later the call came. "Young West, we're going to throw you to the lions. You will be our commentator at the Warwickshire-South Africa match at Edgbaston."

Every commentator has his own tale of nerves on debut and they all start with the extreme sensitivity you feel when you talk out loud in front of a boxful of broadcasters who have been doing it for a long time. Peter West was in fact the only commentator, but he was positioned outdoors on the verandah and the South Africans could hear his every word and kept turning around as if there was a funny smell about. He had three more radio commissions in that 1947 season.

Peter is very much the allrounder in the communications business. He was soon doing rugby on radio and then, in 1950, on television. The eggs were popping into several baskets. For instance, he began a six-year stint as the first editor of Playfair Cricket Annual.

Along came televised Test cricket for the first time in 1952. Peter West was on the commentary team, so you see, we are saying farewell to a founder member, a pioneer who helped make the profession for many who have come along to join him. His own personal appeal went wider than sports broadcasting. He was on the panel of What's My Line and chairman of several panel games, perhaps the best remembered of which is Guess My Story with Eunice Gayson and Michael Pertwee as resident team members.

For 15 years Peter hosted Come Dancing. Often I have heard people wonder how he managed to confuse his public image so much. Surely games-watchers on TV did not want to have the play described by the dancing master! The West reply is plain and practical. "There was not enough money in sports broadcasting along in those days, although I presented Wimbledon 27 times and many Olympic and Commonwealth Games. I was the worst dancer out of captivity, but they wanted a sound technical performer. Remember our programmes were mostly live in those days."

He gave up Come Dancing when he became the rugby correspondent of The Times in 1972, a position he fulfilled with tremendous enthusiasm and caring for 12 years. Then, also in the early 1970s, he went up front at the cricket and became the regular front man for the BBC's television cricket coverage.

Why has Peter West stayed at the top so long, as long as he himself has chosen? You must see him at work to a TV camera with the dreaded talk-back rattling away in his ear: WEST -Good morning ... an enthralling prospect ... third day of the second Cornhill Test at ...

EARPIECE -Widen Camera 3, yes, good ... show us the pitch behind Westy.

WEST (with rhythm unbroken) -... Trent Bridge. Fascinating battle between these two sides, England winning the First Test at Manchester and Australia taking the honours at Lord's. And the key to this day's play may well be in the pitch...

EARPIECE -Camera 4, show me the groundsman. No, that's not the groundsman, that's the Australian physio ... groundsman's gone. Anyway, Westy ... lead me into the fall of Gower's wicket last night.

WEST - (still warmly smiling, serene on top of the water, but paddling like hell underneath to shift the subject matter to Gower)... I am sure the England dressing-room held a discussion on the uneven bounce last night, because David Gower appeared to be a victim. We have another chance to judge for ourselves...

EARPIECE -Westy. Gower's wicket. Not ready.

WEST - (buying time for his team-mates with the technical problems down below and still advancing without hesitation and with steady tread) ... Of course, the whole point of reviewing the Gower dismissal is in case it gives us a pointer to the behaviour of the batting surface ...

EARPIECE - Right, Westy. Here comes Gower. Lead us to it.

And away he goes. His job is viciously difficult, and yet he glides through a technical minefield, calmly covering the impossibility of the jobs done out of sight, when the gremlins hit the hardware or the software or both at the same time. Television cricket is a team game. He personifies that.

Lest you think I exaggerate my praise because he is retiring, or because I have just joined the television team, I must turn to the man whose job it is to assemble the team, I must turn to the man whose job it is to assemble the team, executive producer Nick Hunter. Why has West survived so long in a highly competitive field?

"Because his love and understanding of cricket have never let him down. He can talk to anyone about cricket. Do you remember that Centenary Test? He interviewed over 40 cricketers. What's more, when it rains, and the stage is all his, he looks forward to going on it. Very important. He will go anywhere at any time. Phone him late on a Saturday night and say you need him on a Sunday, and he'll be in the car. He is also brave. Those balcony interviews with captains, especially losing captains, can be hell, but he never shirks the hard editorial question, not even in front of players and officials, crowds yelling below, and all the viewers. He would still ask Botham if giving up the captaincy changed his batting form."

On TV you can throw Peter West any ball and he can play it. His ability is the fruit of his wide broadcasting experience (especially in live situations), his almost genial love of the crisis, and the durability which is essential to the freelance, who has no guarantee of work but the next telephone call.

Remember Edgbaston? Rain belting down. No covered interview areas in those days. West under umbrella interviews Benaud, not quite under the same umbrella. Unfortunately for Benaud, West is holding the umbrella at such an angle that the rainwater is running off the nylon straight down the back of Benaud's neck. Benaud, another true professional, keeps going, until Peter inquires at the end, "Anything you'd like to add, Richie?"

"Only that I'd be delighted to move, to get away from the water running down my neck."

"Never mind," comes back West. "They tell me there's a drought in Australia."

I wish him no droughts in his garden, luck with his forthcoming autobiography, lots of fine times with three children, Jackie, who lectures at Bristol University, Simon, a Bristol solicitor, and Stephen, a doctor in Cheltenham, and also with his five grandchildren. He will be pottering about. He says it's therapeutic.

"But I'm only retiring from cricket. I'm still open to offers. Mind you say that." There speaks a true freelance.