Grumpy Oldie Man
The golden era of Richie Benaud’s commentary has been reduced to dull dressing-room banter
matthew norman
If you are among the countless millions who yearn to watch England vs Australia live on telly but are unable or unwilling to pay Sky Sports for the privilege, the following medical bulletin may come as no consolation.
But I mention all the same that my sphincter is in danger of being pierced by the horns of the dilemma on which I sit. Should I offer you sympathy for the deprivation, or envy you for being spared Sky’s coverage?
We have reached that point in the sporting calendar at which tradition dictates that nostalgists rend the mourning garments like one of Sophocles’s Trojan Women – though the bereavement concerns the spiritual father to generations of cricket fans rather than a son slain by Achilles.
It is four years since Richie Benaud died, and a decade longer since his voice passed from the domestic airwaves.
It vanished for the same reason that it was more revered than any that ever commentated on any televised sport. Richie, though technically mortal, was a god.
In the early 1970s, my cousin Nick’s and my adoration cleared the boundary with alarming obsession. We spent untold boyhood hours trying to impersonate him, and speculating about this austere figure’s private life.
In one fantasy with minimal connection to the actualité, his wife Agnes had left him for both Bedser twins, being unable to tell them apart. Distraught, Richie sat in his oak-panelled study (we located him to a Gothic mansion, possibly patrolled by a hunchbacked manservant named Igor) holding a balloon of brandy, a bottle of sleeping pills and his trusty Luger.
Why he had three hands is as lost in the fog of time as why we renamed his missus Agnes when the real one was called Daphne. For non-psychiatrists among the readership, may it suffice that we regarded him as a deity – and deities, as Hindu theology attests, are unbound by human restrictions with regard to quantity of limbs.
We worshipped Richie for the usual reasons – the sporadic shards of wit, his unrivalled technical insights and above all his knowing when to speak and when to permit the pictures to speak for themselves.
But his divinity stretched beyond the laconic genius with words to his absolute integrity.
So it was that after the 2005 Ashes (the Greatest Series Ever Played, and the last broadcast live in Britain on a terrestrial network), he refused to join Rupert Murdoch’s Sky. He would not countenance the denial of free-to-air Test cricket to the huge majority of its fans.
In a way, that came as a relief. However painful it was to be robbed of this erstwhile and brilliant captain of Australia, it would have been even more so to hear his artistry diluted by men in blazers whose sole qualification was their (at best) mediocre captaincy of England.
His golden era on the BBC found him sharing the commentary with dear old Jim Laker. Reunited after months apart, they greeted each other on air with a brusque ‘Mornin’, Richie;’ ‘Mornin’, Jim.’ It would have been sacrilege to be exposed to Ian Botham’s and David Gower’s winsome reflections on how they spent the previous night, or Nasser Hussain’s sanitised version of dressingroom banter.
Coping with Sky is a difficult experience, the purely technical challenge being to co-ordinate the BBC’S Test Match Special radio commentary (every bit as good as ever) with the muted Sky TV footage. On an average day, I spend at least three times longer fiddling with the pause button on the remote, in the quest for perfect synchronicity, than watching cricket.
But at least I can watch if I choose, unlike compatriots robbed of the chance by the twin national diseases – not identical like the Bedsers, but conjoined – of unbridled free-marketeering rapacity and the very English form of corruption that is political cowardice in the face of a commercial bully.
It was the government of Tony Blair, resident of a grace-and-favour apartment a fraction of an inch to the south of Rupert Murdoch’s colon at the time, that gifted Sky its monopoly on live domestic coverage. But the capitulation predates Blair.
The exact date when the British state surrendered to Murdoch is unclear, but the beginning of the process can be carbon-dated to Mrs Thatcher’s forming the axis that has shaped our history. She merrily at his bidding sent the police to Wapping. He gleefully in return did hers in every regard.
Without his newspapers’ rabid 30-year campaign of misinformation about the EU, there would be no Brexit. Compared with the loss of GDP, national dignity and global relevance, the loss of live cricket to terrestrial TV will seem a trivial privation.
But anyone fuming about being denied the chance to watch the second Test at Lord’s should appreciate this. The genesis of this outrage, as of so many, was the home side’s defeat in the earlier and more crucial test between England and Australia in the Commons.