PIGEONS, WIND-UPS, CAKES – IT CAN ONLY BE TMS ...

And now, Radio 4 Long Wave listeners are leaving us briefly for the Shipping Forecast... one of the quirks of being plugged into Test Match Special is that when you switch on in the middle of the day, and hear a grave voice describing the situation as “variable, moderate to good, occasionally poor…” you’re not always sure whether they’re talking about Broad and Anderson, or Dogger and Fisher.

It’s a hard enough life skippering a North Sea trawler without having to listen to Henry Blofeld’s pigeon update before you can find out whether a Force Nine is on the way. And can we really be sure that a modest catch is the result of EU Fish Quotas, or the crew needing to lie down in a darkened room for a couple of hours after an England batting collapse?

I had this vision, last Sunday afternoon, of a Captain Birdseye-style salty old sea dog with an earphone plugged into TMS whilst wrestling with a net full of angry haddock. “Bloody hell!” he exclaims. “What’s up skip?” shouts his deckhand. “Hole in the net?” “Worse than that. Cook hasn’t enforced the follow on!” Even the fish are open-mouthed – in disbelief rather than trying to find some water to gulp.

England’s decision to bat again at Old Trafford worked out fine in the end, but at the time it caused a mild attack of apoplexy among the wise old heads in the TMS box, and if there was ever a moment you wanted Fred Trueman to have been on air at the time, this was it.

To begin with, listeners would have been twiddling with their radio dial in the belief that a noise not dissimilar to a cat being strangled was a blip with the reception, followed by ten minutes of Fred wondering what was going off out there, and a further ten minutes of Fred explaining precisely why it would have been different in his day. Fred’s day, of course, occupying a time in history somewhere between Lord Hawke and Methuselah.

This summer (and TMS put together a special tribute to commemorate it at Lord’s) marked 25 years of Jonathan Agnew commentating on England Test matches, and a peerless quarter of a century it’s been. Aggers and cricket go together like Dimbleby and Royal Weddings, and he would certainly have enjoyed having Fred sitting next to him when England came out to bat again with a lead of about 10,000.

“Well, Fred, sound decision don’t you think? After all, the bowlers must need a rest. Especially poor old Stuart Broad, who’s sent down, oh, a good half a dozen overs. I guess you’d have been just as tired in the circumstances.” No-one lights blue touch papers with a defter touch, and Aggers might well have signed off his stint with: “And after an explosion from Fred Trueman, it will be Alison Mitchell.”

In the absence of Fred, Aggers has a pretty decent outlet for his mischievous streak in Geoffrey Boycott, and sure enough, at 11.28am on the opening

If the banter does at times stray just the wrong side of informed comment, it strikes a pretty good balance for a broadcast lasting nine hours

morning, just eight minutes after Boycs’ first stint, Agnew was off the mark with one that swung both ways and removed Geoffrey’s middle stump.

It began with Boycs talking about his schoolboy days in the Yorkshire nets during winter, when it was so cold the spinners had to warm their fingers on the tea urn. “It’s all central heated now,” he said. “Like batting in a greenhouse.” Cue Aggers: “Well, you’d have been okay batting in a greenhouse Geoffrey. No chance of a broken window.”

Blowers’ popularity is as strong as ever (he came sixth in a recent Radio Times pole as the most favourite male voice on radio) and is even more endearing for his propensity for commentating on what appears to be a different match. Entrusted with the new ball for the opening morning, Henry set the scene by informing the listeners that England had dropped Finn and Bell, rather than Finn and Ball, quickly followed by: “And here come the Sri Lankan fielders led by Misbah.”

It was a tricky start, not made any easier by the fact that the pigeons took their time turning up for this one. Pigeons are Henry’s default go-to when there’s a lull in proceedings, but on the opening morning they were late enough on parade to leave Henry rueing the pecking order, so to speak.

Good news, though, when a crane came to Henry’s rescue. Not one of those birds you can sometimes mistake for herons, but the type employed for swinging steel girders around in the construction of a new hotel just outside Old Trafford. This one, Henry informed the listeners, was yellow at the top, and rust coloured underneath, but what made it “really rather exciting” in Henry’s own words, was that he saw it move. Adding (and I’ll sheepishly admit that it had never really occurred to me before) that “cranes tend not to move when you’re looking at them”.

This is the kind of off-piste stuff that TMS listeners either love or don’t, and another issue which provokes lively debate is the number of ex-players cluttering up the box. Or in the case of Michael Vaughan, cluh-ering it up. Vaughan doesn’t do Ts for some reason, ergo England are baa-ing, or Bloggs has been bowling well in coun-ee cricket. It’s enough to wonder whether he was born in a disco, and raised by teenagers.

TMS has a pretty good record of wandering off at a tangent, and new(ish) girl Alison has cottoned on pretty quickly. As part of Aggers’ anniversary celebrations, someone had baked a cake commemorating the famous leg-over moment, prompting Alison to say, in a slightly risqué moment you’d have to say, that she was looking forward to a “nibble of Ian Botham’s thigh”.

On my last sighting of Beefy’s thigh it would have taken more than just a nibble, but if the banter does at times stray just the wrong side of the line between informed comment and a bit of fun, it strikes a pretty good balance for a broadcast spanning something like nine hours.

It’s always polarised opinion, never more so than when Boycott is on. When Ben Stokes was given out caught on the flimsiest of DRS evidence, and the majority view was that Stokes got the rough end of it, Boycs, from behind glass 150 yards away, boomed: “I gave it out straight away. I didn’t need t ’third ooompire to know e’d nicked eet.”

And that’s the only problem I have with Geoffrey. But stick with him. Once he overcomes that natural shyness, and acquires a bit of self confidence, he’ll be just fine.