As news value the Boat Race is a rapidly wasting
asset. So far as the popular papers are concerned it is worth next to nothing by Monday morning. To the Daily Express, indeed, the greatest race for two generations was worth, so far as I could discover, precisely nothing. To the Daily Herald it was worth three lines in small print at the bottom of a column, to the Daily Mail ten lines, to the News Chronicle 21 lines (including the interesting calculation that Cambridge won by one second out of 1,137 seconds). The Times, per contra, had three-quarters of a column on its principal news page. One thing I am quite clear about is that to hear about the race, particularly such a race as this, on the wireless, is incomparably better and more exciting than watching it from any point on the bank. The commentary is done extremely well—though to that tribute I would make certain reservations. I refuse to believe that anyone, except perhaps a handful of Old Blues, is in the smallest degree interested in periodical counts of the strokes (" One—out ; two—out," and so on), and no one on earth cares whether the com- mentator is getting wet and reaching for his Mackintosh or not— subjects on which he thought it necessary to inform ten or fifteen million listeners. No one at that moment would have worried in the least if he had been washed overboard and vanished, provided there was someone else to carry on.
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