Giles Smith: Champagne moments on double Right Guard day (07 June 1997)

Saturday 7 June 1997

Champagne moments on double Right Guard day

By Giles Smith

MAYBE the Test Match Special team would have thrown a 40th birthday party on Thursday, but there just wasn`t room. The Edgbaston radio commentary box is four seats wide, at a pinch, with carpet on the walls and a blanket-covered desk. Behind it, a narrow white corridor serves as both office and refuelling space and looks like the kitchenette in a deeply disap- pointing holiday cottage. A party? There`s barely enough room to throw a commentary.

It was around 10am on Thursday when the team started to show up. Jonathan Agnew - tall, permanently smiling and almost implausibly amiable - noted the confined space and im- mediately declared it "a double Right Guard day". Precariously close to the coffee-makers, hot-water urn and basket of sugar sachets sat a tape machine on which Peter Baxter, the producer of TMS, was editing, with a razor-blade, the item which would be played in the tea interval. Henry Blofeld arrived in a yellow bow-tie with grey polka dots and loafers with gold chains strung across them ("Hello, Aggers." "Hello, Blowers."); Fred Trueman turned up; also Christopher Martin-Jenkins and Neville Oliver. And Richie Benaud walked in, too; but he was lost and had to be redirected upstairs to the television box.

With an hour to go until play, conversation turned to news coverage of the anniversary, much of which had centred on that famous TMS moment in which the late Brian Johnston, the programme`s guiding spirit, cracked up on air and spent a minute-and-a-half failing to calm down. This is the joyful clip known simply to the team as "Leg-Over". The Today programme had played an extract - a mistake, Baxter thinks: "You can`t really edit leg-over."

And neither can you cut down the TMS team`s fascination for innuendo, which even now continues to exercise them - certainly off-air, as when Bill Frindall entertained Agnew on Thursday by telling him that "Fred finds he gets a bit stiff coming up the stairs". Quite apart from the serious business of ballby-ball commentary, they are all - as they would probably put it themselves - hotly in pursuit of another leg-over. Hence moments like the one when Agnew, having observed someone taking a flash at the ball outside off stump, turned to Trueman and asked: "Were you ever a flasher, Fred?"

On Thursday, everyone was impressively unaffected by the presence in the commentary box of James Boyle, the controller of Radio Four. This could only seem politically significant: news stories on the TMS anniversary have nearly all included some debate on the programme`s future. One highly imaginative piece insisted that John Major would soon be stepping in as presenter: others implied, more blandly, that ball-by- ball commentary would not be long among us.

But then Test Match Special is never not "under threat". Agnew says that unsettledness has coloured all of the seven years he has been on the programme. Still, for the moment, most agree that Radio Four is a fair place to be. For what is TMS if not spoken-word radio? Agnew says he derived considerable reassurance from his conversation on Thursday with Boyle. In any case, no one can remember the controller of Radio Three popping his or her head around the studio door during the programme`s long and not uncomplicated years there; and if they ever had, the assumption would have been they were looking for the off switch.

Mr Boyle was not the only big cheese in the commentary box that morning. There was also, under a shelf in a corner, a large potted Stilton. Despite their legendary partiality to homemade cakes, the TMS team are not big snackers, unless you count Dennis Lillee and the chewing gum he occasionally removes from his mouth to store for later.

The programme was already under way when Lillee and his former bowling partner, Jeff Thomson, showed up. An anguished `phone call had been made in pursuit of them, but Baxter`s threat to reduce their fee by -L10 for every minute they were late was forgotten with their arrival. If Aggers and Blowers are as cosy as a Victoria sponge, then Lillee and Thomson -special guests on TMS for this Ashes series - bring to the table something a little more salty.

In contrast to the cricket club clothes all around him, Lillee was wearing a T-shirt and jeans and had a baseball cap thrust through one of his belt loops. ("Smarten up, chap," Agnew scolded him when he arrived.) After his first stint at the microphone, Lillee approached Peter Baxter, still working at his tape machine, and asked: "Are you checking we didn`t say f***?"

THE box was by now impossibly crowded and when Agnew handed over to Oliver, it was not one of the most dignified manoeuvres one had ever seen. Agnew had to hitch himself up into his chair and then climb over the back of it, simultaneously removing his headset microphone and passing it to Oliver as he squeezed past him into the space.

Still, the sense of the occasion and the immediate splendour of the cricket, from an English point of view, seemed to mingle and conjoin. Great joy greeted England`s bowling - and also Trueman`s first "What`s going off?" of the series (his traditional phrase of disgruntlement, directed here at Devon Malcolm for bowling a bouncer at a low-order batsman). Meanwhile, among the Australians Lillee was blaming himself: "Every time I go on, two more wickets fall."

Shortly after lunch (cold chicken and salad available in the kitchenette) Agnew, in a state of some excitement, showed me a fax he was about to send upstairs to Sybil Ruscoe, who was reporting on the Test for Radio Five Live. It was a letter complimenting her on her programme and asking her if she would mind explaining the term "googly". The signature at the bottom was `Hugh Jarce`.

"It`s the old Hugh Jarce one," Agnew explained, "but hopefully she`ll read it without noticing." He went on to recall the time he fooled Blofeld with a fax from a carpet manufacturer, promising a free fitting for a mention on the air. Blofeld read it out. Agnew followed it up with another, from the carpet man`s chief rival, swearing to report Blofeld to the director general of the BBC. "Blowers is no contest any more," Agnew said, sadly.

Agnew was not the only one putting his down-time to good use. One of the regular sights at the back of the box is that of Trueman with his arms round one or two people, drawing them close to share with them a joke which is not only unfit for public consumption, but clearly only doubtfully fit for private consumption as well.

Meanwhile, Oliver was off out on to the roof for a cigarette ("If I smoked in the box then Fred would light up his pipe and we`d all bloody choke to death") and the mail arrived - a sixinch wodge of cards and letters of congratulation - as well as a bottle of champagne from the BBC TV crew upstairs.

Just before the tea interval, a large cake was delivered in a white box, a gift from the Daily Star. It was bright pink and in the shape of a pair of breasts - a fairly radical variation, this, on the fondant fancies famously submitted to the programme by listeners. Underneath, in icing, a message read "Ooh aah, Big Bouncaah!", an allusion to the Star`s advertising slogan as well as to its pioneering sense of humour.

Agnew, who was delighted, lowered the box carefully under the nose of CMJ at the microphone. CMJ was as unfazed as a man can be who finds himself interrupted at work by a breastshaped sponge. He referred only to the arrival of "an unusual cake" and mentioned that it looked "unappetising". At the back, and offmicrophone, Thomson called out, "Bullshit!" The cake was then taken away and not seen again.

THE afternoon wore on and the game, for the first time, hit a lull. This, however, did not communicate itself very clearly to the box. At the back, Thomson amused himself by answering the `phone. "Hello," he said. "Harley Street Clinic." And Agnew re-entered with great news: Ruscoe had fallen for the Hugh Jarce fax. Agnew was beside her when she read it out on air. "She didn`t even notice!" he said. "Splendid! Job done!"

Near the close of play, the atmosphere was at last more studied. Most of the team members have other media reporting duties to fulfil and many in the box now had the anxious expression of people trying to do their maths homework during French. Also, team members kept having to be hauled out to a microphone in the corridor to do short pieces for evening news programmes.

In the confusion, Blofeld found himself introduced onair somewhere as "Jon Agnew" which did not seem to please him. The general feeling seemed to be that it was hard enough organising a day`s coverage, without having a birthday to celebrate at the same time.

And still no party. But maybe next time.

Source :: The Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/)