Speaking up for the finest sports broadcaster we had
‘HOW soon succeeding eyes begin to look, not read”, wrote Larkin in “An Arundel Tomb”. How soon, too, succeeding ears begin to hear, not listen. That thought blossomed while reading a new book by Stephen Fay and David Kynaston about John Arlott and EW “Jim” Swanton, cricket commentators of an era that must seem as distant to modern dial-twiddlers as the Plantagenets.
Swanton, late of this parish, addressed listeners in a haughty manner that brooked no argument. He was admired, not loved. Arlott, who died nine years before Swanton, in 1991, was loved in a way that no British sports broadcaster ever was.
For many who grew up with that Hampshire voice in their ears, Arlott was the finest broadcaster of all, and it is impossible to play down the Hampshire element, for it gave his speech its salt. It was the kind of rural English voice, natural and unapologetic, that Hardy may have heard.
No glottal stops, rising inflections, elisions, or vowels stretched to breaking point: how on earth would Arlott get on the radio or television today? Consider that question the next time you hear Robert Peston and Mockney Tom Bradby, two well-bred boys who unaccountably speak in unnatural voices. These days speech must be urban and “edgy”. Rural folk are mere woolly-backs.
Few people under 40 will have heard Arlott, who stood down from active service in 1980, and lived his last years in Alderney, where Ian Botham was a regular visitor. “Bring your thirst with you”, Arlott used to tell the great all-rounder – and he did! Read Fay and Kynaston – it’s a fine book – and raise a glass to a magnificent, absolutely authentic Englishman.
There were disturbances on the streets of Paris this week, “in solidarity”, one supposes, with the class of ‘68, who went a bit further. Those rioters of yore are now rich architects and diplomats, happy to let younger men and women take up the cause.
But were those times so revolutionary? The Rolling Stones, it is true, sang later that year about a “Street Fighting Man”. Take a look at the pop charts that May, however, and a different picture emerges. Louis Armstrong was reigning, and Satchmo was followed in short order by Andy Williams, Cliff Richard, Engelbert Humperdinck and Jacky of “White Horses” fame: subversives every one, striving in concert to unpick the he threads of our civilisation.
The protesters were mainly students in thrall to ludicrous figures like Jean-Paul Sartre. The workers, on whose behalf they were supposedly protesting, had no time for bannerwavers they regarded as wastrels. Not much has changed there then.
Another landmark this month is being celebrated in cinemas. Lindsay Anderson’s If... (note the ellipsis; it’s meant to be significant) opened in 1968 to great acclaim. “If only we could get it together, we could change the world” was the gist of the film, which has not aged well.
Anderson, like many radicals, had a grand manner. Introduced to Rowley Leigh, who was then running Kensington Place, he told the star chef: “I went there once, and had some rather poor lamb mb
at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion chops”. Leigh hit the ball for six: “I saw Britannia Hospital, and didn’t think much of that, either”. Anderson was not a Soixante-Huitard but he travelled in the same bus. If only he had stuck to This Sporting Life. Now there was a film.
On Tuesday Radio 2 is saying farewell to two old-fashioned shows the station no longer has time for. The O Organist Entertains has been running for 38 years, and Listen to the Band for 23, so Nigel Ogden and Frank Renton, the bottle-aged presenters, may shed a few manly tears as they wave us goodbye.
It’s not the end of the world, merely one of life’s small disappointments, but all the same it’s avoidable. Does nobody at the BBC realise that as people get older their tastes modify and sometimes change altogether? Young men and women who listened to Traffic and the Grateful Dead 50 years ago now take their pleasures more innocently. Hello! Is anybody there?