HOW THE QUEEN PUT ME IN MY PLACE
When Marie Antoinette famously said “Let them eat cake”, she was unlikely to have been having percipient thoughts about Test Match Special. Nonetheless, cakes were to become an integral part of the programme.
It all began in 1974 when a lady who had heard Brian Johnston talk of his passion for chocolate cake sent him a large and particularly goodlooking one on the first day of the Lord’s Test. A precedent had been created.
As soon as Johnners had died, our listeners mysteriously and inexplicably, I thought, began to send us an abundance of fruit cakes. In 2001, Steve Waugh’s Australians came to England and, as usual, played the second Test match at Lord’s. Buckingham Palace announced that the Queen was going to come to the match.
To celebrate, the PR machine at the Palace had decreed that the chefs there should make a suitably regal fruit cake, which Her Majesty would bring with her and present to us during the tea interval. At the start of the extended tea interval, five of us – Jonathan Agnew, Christopher Martinjenkins, Bill Frindall, Peter Baxter and me – began to push our way round through the crowd. We filed in and the Queen presented the cake to Peter on a salver. She looked a trifle quizzical, as if she was not sure of her brief. When I shook her hand, she said, “You must find it awfully difficult to know what to say when nothing is happening.”
“One of the things about Test Match Special, Your Majesty,” I replied, “is that when rain or bad light has stopped play and nothing is happening, we carry on talking about anything and everything, and many of our listeners write in and say how much better we are when nothing is happening.”
I hoped this might bring a smile to her face. But I got that badly wrong. She looked a trifle solemn and her head seemed to sway slightly, and she came back with, “How dreadfully sad.”
The final words we had with the monarch came after we had all been introduced to her. Play had already begun again and she turned to Peter Baxter.
“With all of you here, how are you remaining on the air?” she asked.
“Well, Your Majesty,” Peter came back strongly, “we have an Australian.”
“Oh,” said the Queen, very cheerfully. “They can be very useful, can’t they?”