Final Whistle:
IWalker was status quo, while Hunt was rebellious, but it helped the former to do some of his best work
t is hard to imagine that the late hell-raiser James Hunt is currently surrounded by too many cherubim or seraphim, but whatever the afterlife looks like for Formula One legends, he has now been joined in the great grand-prix commentary box in the sky by his long-term broadcast partner Murray Walker. Hunt retired from driving during the 1979 season and roared into the broadcast studio to join Walker, where together they would form one of TV’S great duos.
The partnership ended too soon, with Hunt’s untimely death in 1993, aged just 45. Walker himself still had many more laps to go after that but, like the loss of Peter Alliss in December, his passing on Saturday at the age of 97 is a sadness to all of us for whom the sport and the man had been interlinked for as long as we can remember.
Walker – always on the front row of the grid for any amateur impressionist – had a style as distinct as it was memorable. Like Alliss, Richie Benaud, Bill Mclaren, Peter O’sullevan and Dan Maskell, Walker had the full toolkit for a commentator: an unmistakable voice and delivery, combined with an absolute passion for his sport. His chosen style was of the excitable enthusiast but, under the bonnet there was serious authority, a painstaking approach to research and the understanding of the minutiae of his sport, and a love of communicating.
He was a more cerebral person than his on-mic persona might have suggested and he knew that his commentary quirks, gaffes, idiosyncrasies and “Colemanballs” were part of the brand. He was, after all, an advertising man who came up with the “Opal Fruits: made to make your mouth water” jingle, and was part of the company who created “A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play”.
Walker was, by temperament, a conservative who was slow to the point of being lapped in finding fault with his sport’s less appealing corners. Although that reluctance to criticise was perhaps the only slow thing about him; who could improve on Clive James’s observation that “even in moments of tranquillity, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire”.
Where Walker was status quo, Hunt was rebellious and iconoclastic. It was in this oddcouple tandem that Walker did some of his best and most-loved work. Hunt was the perfect foil: laconic where Walker was excitable; louche where Walker was fastidious; combative and controversial about the sport and drivers where Walker was, above all, hopelessly smitten with F1.
It was said that Hunt drank two bottles of wine for the live commentary of the 1980 Monaco GP. Perhaps France and its principality brought something out in Hunt; he said of Frenchman Rene Arnoux that he was “a disaster” and that he “did not deserve to be in Formula One” after Arnoux ruined Gerhard Berger’s 1988 Austrian GP. A year later, Walker noted that Arnoux said he was hobbled by not being able to drive with a turbocharger. Hunt thundered an expletive on air in response. Walker: “Anyway…” and on with the show.
On one occasion, Walker told viewers that Hunt was out of the box inspecting the track; in fact, Hunt was off having a smoke of a special cigarette. The pair complemented each other perfectly.
Like the other broadcast immortals, Walker profited from working in an era when sporting TV was a monolith: the BBC having a free run at F1 before ITV took over in 1997 and later the Sky era.
There will not be another Murray Walker, nor an Alliss, nor a Maskell: the audience has atomised too much in a multi-channel – and perhaps also a more critical – era where on-air slip-ups are seized on with spite and fury rather than acceptance or affection.
Nobody was held in greater affection than Walker, to whom one simply has to give the last word: “There is nothing wrong with the car, except that it’s on fire.”