SPECTATOR SPORT
Radio fun
Frank Keating
PETER West's uncharacteristic outburst about Geoffrey Boycott's commentating style on BBC's Test match transmissions publicly blows the gaff on the perception of a contented and chummy camaraderie in sport's broadcasting boxes around the shires. Don Mosey's forthcoming auto- biography will also, by all accounts, upset several of his fellow waffle merchants at the Test Match Special radio mike. Bonho- mie be blowed: as in any long-running serial,ethe cast in 'real life' have never been half as matey as they might seem to be once the jaunty signature-tune starts up and the compelling little red light goes on.
In his letter to the Times, the veteran and usually affable West suggested bitterly that Boycott belt up with his tedious sermo- nising. Each to their own. Taste in a sports commentator . is a very personal thing. Myself, I'm just nutty about Geoffrey. Almost as much as he is himself. He has forgotten more about the game than me or Mr West ever knew. Unlike his compat- riot, Fred Trueman (who may have taken over 300 Test Wickets, but many tens of thousands more on the radio), Boycott seems to me to go out of his way to be generous to the modern player. No, our Geoff's a natural. Obsessive and obsessed, but a natural. I positively drooled with pleasure in the last Test when he pro- nounced from the pulpit, 'Creek-et, ahm tellin' yer, is both spiritually, mentally, and physically, soul destroyin.'
Another radio voice which riddles the spine, in an even more sensuous way, is Barbara Potter's on Radio 5 from Wimble- don. A famous former US Wightman Cupper she may be, but that comes across is a delicious, sleep-filled sexpot's murmur, as if she's waking you up with a cup of coffee in her log-cabin pad in Connecticut, and baby it's cold outside, but in here with you there's only that lovely warm fug of tousled sheets and private parts Heaven. Till you snap out of the hypnotic reverie her voice inspires and realise, dammit, that she's actually rabbiting on about ruddy Ivan (sorry, Ee-vonn) Lend!, or some such robotic purveyor of volley or serve.
Or they switch you back to the cricket. West's breaking of ranks could not have been better timed to give veracity to Peter Gibbs's hugely enjoyable radio play this week, Taking Us Up to Lunch (Radio 3), which was a rich send-up of life and loathings in the Test Match Special com- mentary box. Gibbs, like Boycott, knows his stuff. Before he took up his pen he scored over 7,000 runs for Derbyshire as a doughty opening bat a couple of decades ago. He scored 12 first-class centuries; following the last one, against Warwick- shire at Edgbaston, he retired. Just like that. He told me why.
`I was always a bit of a stodge, a stonewaller. But here on that last sunlit day at Edgbaston, in a split second I saw the light. My namesake, the illustrious Lance, was flighting them down. Suddenly, a sublime feeling. Just one ball. I hit it off the back foot through midwicket, an old fashioned attacking shot of the richest vintage imaginable. One of the most diffi- cult shots possible. And I played it to absolute perfection. Sublime. Sensational.
`Yet when I got back to the pavilion, the moment tormented me. Here was I, at the end of a long career in which I had been seeking to reach that pinnacle of supreme satisfation every time I'd been at the crease, but now fully aware that I'd never reach it again, not ever. But, worse, was being aware totally that someone like Barry Richards was strolling out and doing such things at will every day of every summer. It was time to pack up'.
But what a way to go.
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