Let them eat cake
Test Match Special is 50 this summer but change looms. Paul Coupar reports
Paul Coupar
17-May-2007
Test Match Special is 50 this summer but change looms
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Britons do not care for changes to national institutions.
Whether it is a phone box that is not red, a funnyshaped
Times or the rumoured demise of salad cream,
there is an instinct to resist anything that upsets the
old order. Which will make this an anxious summer
for the three to four million listeners to the BBC's Test
Match Special.
According to some sources close to the programme, TMS is in
peril. Midway through this summer its producer and greatest
champion leaves. Peter Baxter retires after 34 seasons under the
headphones nurturing a unique family atmosphere. The word is of a
change in "style and tone".
TMS will survive. In fact, the BBC is investing more heavily than
ever. Whether it does so in a familiar form is less certain.
It is mid-morning in Barbados. Far below the swanky airconditioned
broadcasting box, perched above the redeveloped
Kensington Oval, Ireland are edging forward against Bangladesh.
It is not quite like watching Sir Viv in his pomp - not that you would
guess it from the commentary.
Tony Cozier has just finished a vivid story about the terrifying
Barbados club attacks. The man beside him, Jonathan Agnew, recalls
visiting Cozier's "mansion" the night before. "Wooden bungalow,"
corrects Cozier. "Whatever," says Agnew, "it's certainly very hard
to find." "Good," says Cozier, emphatically but with a grin, before
breaking into a detailed analysis of West Indies' decline and fall.
It is classic TMS - deep cricket knowledge worn lightly; no
staleness, despite the low-key match; and the sense that the listener
is just another of a bunch of friends.
This intimacy is broadcasting gold dust. Alistair Cooke managed
it in his Letter From America, as did Radio 1's John Peel who, like TMS's
Brian Johnston, was deeply mourned following his death. After that
you start to run out of comparisons. The fear of some is that, with
Baxter gone and new controllers at Five Live given a free hand, the
sense of being part of a nationwide club will be sacrificed for newsdriven
content and a shriller tone.
So does Agnew foresee big changes? "Errm, I don't know. Peter's
leaving and he has obviously been a big influence on the programme
for 40 years. So inevitably, when a new person comes in, there will
be change to an extent. A new producer will want to look at things
his or her way. But it's a hard programme to change because you
can't say to me, 'Right Aggers, I don't like the way you commentate,
go and do it that way today,' because you are what you are."
At the back of the box the assistant producer Shilpa Patel has a
more pressing problem - waking one of that afternoon's summarisers.
"You can't ring Viv Richards before midday," she says. It is 10.15am.
"But he'll take it from me," she continues, punching numbers into her
mobile. Unlike the famously technophobic CMJ on a recent tour she
has not brought the remote control for her hotel telly by mistake.
And, for a supposedly conservative institution, TMS has built a
50-year innings by breaking broadcasting rules. Born in 1957, the
programme began quietly. "Worthy but dull," said a former head
of BBC outside broadcasts. But by the 1970s it had taken the rigid
world of BBC sports reporting, ruled by the twin gods of received
pronunciation and formality, and blown it apart.
The fuse was lit by two unlikely revolutionaries - the
consummate poet John Arlott, a former policeman who was there
from the start until 1980, and the consummate professional Brian
Johnston, a flamboyant old Etonian, who arrived after being sacked
by BBC TV in 1970.
From Arlott, his incomparable Hampshire accent eventually
as thick as his favourite clarets, the programme gained its high
regard for unconventional voices, capable of light and shade, and for
commentators with hinterland. ("Your voice is vulgar but you have
an interesting mind," said the BBC's then head of outside broadcasts,
Seymour de Lotbinière.)
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From Johnston it took its ethos ("We're just a bunch of friends
going to the Test match"), its revolutionary chattiness and its famous
digressions, from how to tame wild horses to this winter's argument
about how to study for university exams. ("No lad," Geoff Boycott
told a student swotting late at night, "get thee head down and get
up fresh in t' morning.") Above all, it took from Johnston a Military
Cross-winner's deep conviction that to laugh at a game was no
crime. Johnston provided the life, Arlott the soul.
The template they created has been remarkably successful. Up
to four million people listen to a Test match. "Gathering from the
emails," says Baxter, "a lot of our audience are not just cricket fans,
not sports fans at all, just Test Match Special fans. That shows it is a
slightly different kind of sports programme." It is certainly how your
writer discovered cricket as a boy in Aberdeen. TMS has a strong case
to be the greatest outreach scheme English cricket has known.
The most remarkable thing about the commentary box is that
it is not remarkable. What you see is what you hear on the
radio; it is just as chaotically friendly as it sounds.
CMJ, resplendent in crushed-raspberry trousers ("I don't know
how to begin to describe what's just sat down next to me," says
Agnew to the world) is checking his son Robin's scores for Sussex.
The summariser Mike Selvey is hunched in the corner, writing his
piece for The Guardian. The interval programming is a scrawl on the
back of a team-sheet. The assistant-producer-cum-super-mum Shilpa
is booking dinner and clipping Simon Mann round the ear. The staff
rota is on a giant piece of graph paper, not a spreadsheet.
The programme has usually trod the tightrope between
professionalism and coldness beautifully. (Though Arlott did once
pass out at the microphone after a good lunch.) Indeed the infamous
1991 "leg over" incident was seen at the time as a hideous blunder.
Having melted into uncontrollable laughter, Johnston and Agnew
seldom worked together again. "It wasn't commentary. It was a cockup,"
recalls Agnew, who was in his first season and seriously worried
for his future. It was not the only gaffe. Allan Lamb once used a
piece of colourful Anglo-Saxon rhyming with 'duck' and followed up
with "Shit, did I just say that?"
"People are always surprised," says Baxter when asked about the
warmth in the box, "but what do you expect? If that's the way it
sounds, that's probably the way it is." Agnew, about to be best man
at Baxter's wedding, agrees: "If it sounds like you're having a good
time, the odds are that you are having a good time."
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But the make-up of the team may soon change. "Personnel-wise
a new producer might look to get one or two different people on,"
admits Agnew. "That's inevitable. Change is inevitable. As long as it's
sensible, well-reasoned change, there's no reason it shouldn't be good."
When asked about the secret of the programme, Baxter points to
genuine friendships in the box. "We don't have a very fast turnover
in commentators, so we all know each other very well and that
probably helps. You are at home in the box because we all know each
other." It wasn't always so. Johnston, the bubbly conservative, had a
cool relationship with Arlott, a liberal who habitually wore a black
tie as penance for buying his son the sports car he died in.
However, some sources close to the programme fear that the
BBC Sport modernisers, who have already used the
enthusiastic but lightweight Manish Bhasin on televised
cricket, see intimacy as cloying chumminess and
digressions as irrelevant to the news agenda.
Agnew is reassuring: "The core of the programme
I assume will be the same. Just a little bit of tinkering
here and there - I guess that's how a new person would
look at it." And Adam Mountford, the Five Live producer likely to take
over is a genuine cricket lover.
Some listeners would appreciate change, especially more
diversity in voices and viewpoints. There is a feeling that TMS has
become blander in recent years. It is something Baxter puts down to
a relentless schedule, making it difficult to search for new talent in
unexplored corners. And the BBC is also a victim of its own plenty.
Arlott was discovered when the corporation, in extremis, was forced
to take a gamble on an unknown. That no longer happens.
This could be a live issue for Baxter's successor. Two of the most
distinctive voices in Henry Blofeld (67) and Christopher Martin-
Jenkins (62) are approaching conventional retirement age, if not TMS
retirement age; Johnston continued into his 80s.
So could a new commentator be another Arlott, a policeman and
a poetry producer, or a new Johnners, an outside broadcasts man? "I
am horribly afraid it would be more difficult," says Baxter. "There
aren't too many poetry producers at the BBC now. And that is a
sadness. The sports room is so vast they will always get
people out of it who will manage. Whether they will
get the broadcasting geniuses may be another issue."
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Of course nostalgia is a danger. For every Johnners
there were five line-and-length men - TMS has used
18 commentators in home Tests. And sceptics should
remember the derision heaped on the outstanding
Channel 4 when it first broadcast Tests in 1999. The only true
paradise is perhaps the one we have lost.
Equally, threats to the programme are nothing new. Hungry for
airspace, TMS has over the years been shuffled between networks
like the booby prize in pass the parcel. Radio 1 is the only BBC
national network not to have hosted it. "A sword of Damocles
seemed regularly to hang over us," says Baxter.
And Agnew insists the programme will not change beyond
recognition and that he will resist any attempt to make it more 'yoof'.
"As long as they are sensible, well-balanced, interesting ideas, then
away we go and we see where it takes us," he says. "That's been the
great thing about the programme, when the rain comes down, the
covers come on, where are we going to go? I don't know, somehow it
just happens. And usually we end up in a pretty decent direction."
Millions of listeners - mums and granddads, van drivers and
students, children under the duvet and cricket-lovers galore - will
tune in as it happens, perhaps a little more anxiously than usual.
Paul Coupar is assistant editor of The Wisden Cricketer