Blowers: Why I’m declaring at 77
Just when this grey world needs his mellifluous, plummy tones and schoolboy humour, radio and cricket legend Henry Blofeld tells us he’s bowing out
HIS magnificently plummy voice, ripened over the years by claret dinners and convivial evenings in london’s clubland, is a broadcasting institution, as much a part of the english summer as swallows, Pimm’s and the sound of leather on willow.
For more than 45 years, Henry Blofeld’s throaty baritone — voted one of the top ten voices on radio by radio Times readers last June — has been a riotously enjoyable feature of the BBC’s Test Match Special.
even if you don’t follow cricket, you will know his maverick style of commentary, peppered with excitable descriptions of red buses going past lord’s, pigeons or butterflies fluttering over the pitch, enchanting ladies in turquoise hats and anything else that takes his fancy.
But this morning, alas, I can reveal that Blofeld — Blowers, to his fans — is announcing his retirement from TMS, as the show is called. Just when our colourless world needs him most, Blowers is off.
He will commentate on three more Test Matches, then step down in September. It’s unthinkable, like hearing the Queen say it’s time to pack it in.
‘I’m nearly 100, old thing,’ he protests (not true. He’s 77). ‘you know when it’s time. All the younger people are doing it so well, they don’t want to come back to an old fart like me. It’s time to say goodbye.
‘It’s jolly sad but the older you get, you don’t do it quite so well. I have to bow out when people are going to say “why has Henry Blofeld gone?” and not “why the hell hasn’t Henry Blofeld gone?”.’
It is no secret that his eyesight is deteriorating and has caused problems, although it wasn’t the deciding factor.
There have been slips when he has mistaken one player for another, he says, and the sense is that he wants to go before he makes an unforgivable howler.
It truly will be the end of an era, and the world will be much poorer for the absence of his round vowels and Wodehousian exclamations — everyone is ‘my dear old thing’ and everything is ‘jolly terrific’.
At his mews home in Chelsea, the walls are covered in photographs of dogs, horses and country pursuits. His jumper matches his corduroy trousers perfectly, and both are exactly the same hue as the moccasins on his feet. What colour is it, though?, I ask aloud.
Suddenly he is off, meandering mellifluously just as he does in the commentary box. It’s not quite purple or wine, he reckons, nor mauve. More a ‘sort of heathery shade that calls to mind the wilds of Scotland. I can imagine walking across the moors on a crisp day, over a blanket of this. It makes me think...’
Where this is taking us is lost when his wife Valeria arrives. She ‘was a big shot in the fashion world’, Henry says proudly, and has a penchant for pink hair.
His commentary is not everyone’s cup of tea. ‘But I always say a day’s cricket is like a symphony. There are fast bits, where you only describe the action. Then there are slower bits that can be a little bit dull. So you fill in by talking about the lady in the yellow dress, the trees, the sponge cake a listener has sent in.
‘There will always be a diehard yorkshireman who’ll say “why don’t you stick to the cricket?”, but mostly people love it. They feel part of the action.’
His family name has been given to a Bond villain (ernst Stavro Blofeld — author Ian Fleming was a schoolfriend of his father), but he is possibly the most gentlemanly man in sport.
He says chirpily: ‘I’d never get a job in broadcasting today. I’m too posh, too distinctive. now we live in an age where everyone is told what to do and wants to conform. I come from a time when being different was celebrated.’
An old etonian, he was a promising cricketer in his youth, but his sporting hopes were dashed at the age of 17 when he was hit by a bus on his bicycle: ‘I lay like a broken jam roll in the gutter.’
He spent 28 days in a coma ‘and the doctors had to dig out bits of skull from my brain’.
For a while a career in finance beckoned, but a series of chance encounters gave him the opportunity to report on a cricket match. Four decades on, he can talk for england about how the game has changed on the field and in the commentary box — where things are much more sober than they used to be.
‘That’s one of the big differences. In those days we’d all drink. We’d open the champagne at 12 o’clock and have a glass before lunch, then have lunch — wine, all that — then more champagne during the evening session.’
He says he never drank very much, ‘only two bottles a night’, and looks at me as if I’m deranged when I say two bottles strikes me as quite a bit. He adds that in the hierarchy of heavydrinking broadcasters he was nearly teetotal.
‘ The wonderful John Arlott [doyen of TMS broadcasters] drank two bottles of wine every lunchtime before he started commentating. He was always a better commentator after the wine than before, too.’
He remembers how Arlott once turned up in the commentary box with two briefcases, one containing six bottles of claret, the other five, then uttered the immortal line: ‘With good fortune, that little lot should see us through to the lunch interval.’
Arlott always brought two corkscrews to every game, explaining: ‘If one them breaks, you’re b******d’.
Blowers says Brian Johnston was the one commentator who didn’t really drink: ‘Maybe the odd white burgundy — but Arlott always hated the fact that he couldn’t get Johnners to have a drink.’
It was Johnners, of course, who was rendered helpless by giggles in a 1991 Test when Jonathan Agnew (known as Aggers) was explaining to him that the england allrounder Ian Botham had been dismissed after crashing into his own wicket because ‘he failed to get his leg over’.
Another moment of childish innuendo — and weeping laughter — came when england batsman Kevin Pietersen needed to slip a new rubber sleeve over the handle of his bat, and Aggers said to former england captain Michael Vaughan: ‘It’s not easy putting a rubber on, is it?’ To which Vaughan replied: ‘no, I was never very good at that.’
Blowers says that in all his decades at TMS, puerile humour was never far from the surface: ‘As when Aggers sends me mock emails from cricket fans such as “Hugh Jarce” and “Ivor Biggun”, printed copies of which I’m about to read out before they are snatched from me by producers.’
The laughs are still there at TMS, but not the drink. ‘It didn’t affect what we did,’ says Blowers. ‘But it’s different now.’
He drinks much less himself these days, too. Is this because of the heart attack he suffered in 1999? ‘Well, no. I’m afraid I’ve inherited my mother’s tummy, which can’t take it. Blasted thing. My liver is splendid, though. no problems there, and the doctors say “carry on, old chap” about the wine. I do sleep better without it, though.’
I remind him that he once said if he ever retired, he would drink himself to death in five minutes. Should we be worried? ‘Ah. Well, no, that will not happen. I am busy, you see. I have plenty to do. And I have my lovely wife to look after me. I am jolly lucky.’
He and Valeria met in a wine bar (where else?) in 2009, a few years after his second marriage broke down. ‘As luck would have it, I was having a 70th birthday bash laid on for me at the Albert Hall and I asked if she and her friend would like to come. They decided I must be a conductor.’
little wonder that Valeria, born in Africa of Italian extraction, made an impression. ‘She is an exotic creature, isn’t she?’ he whoops. ‘A splendid girl, quite terrific. of all the wives I’ve had — and one or two near misses, too — Valeria is the only lady who actually enjoys what I do and wants to be a part of it.’
Cricket is his life, always was. He says he sacrificed his first marriage, to Joanne — mother of his only daughter Suki, now in her 50s — to it.
In 1990 he married again but has little to say about his second wife, Bitten, except that ‘it never really worked’ and ended badly and expensively. ‘ She was Swedish. We were never on the same wavelength. She hated the cricket. Then I met Valeria and everything changed.’
He doesn’t seem peeved that the world he came to define was irrevocably changed when television took over from radio as the first source of information for cricket fans.
He has dabbled in TV commentating over the years, but not much in the uK and certainly not on the BBC.
‘I wasn’t asked. I think people realise radio commentators aren’t good on TV. We talk too much. If we stop talking on the wireless, people think we’ve gone away and turn off. on TV, silence is golden.’
What now for Blowers? Showbiz will doubtless fill the gap that sport leaves. He already has a oneman show, and is in demand as an afterdinner speaker. And hurrah for that, for there is no one who speaks quite like him.