He was not just the voice of a sport but the voice of an era
He treated Queen Mother and commoner with the same charm
AH, that voice. The Voice. Silenced now. It never shouted at us, or hectored us, or bored us, or confused us or spoke down to us. Even at the two-furlong marker, its cadences rose in only the most mellifluous manner. There was still time for grammatical sentences. No ‘h’ was ever dropped. Nor, so far as we can remember, was any clanger.
If, as Richie Benaud said, the commentator’s knack was not to barge into a viewer’s sitting room but to act in the style a well-behaved house guest should, it was something Sir Peter O’Sullevan elevated into an art form for half a century.
The Voice exuded panache and warmth. It was a mark of the man, with his lean frame, his Savile Row elegance, his champagne glass and his generosity of spirit.
To meet him in his trademark sheepskin coat and trilby was exactly the experience one had hoped it would be. He spoke warmly even to the least significant new reporter at the races, treating commoner and Queen Mother with as much charm as the other.
It was not just sounding like a more patrician Richard Burton that made O’Sullevan so successful in 14,000 commentaries for the BBC. It was his expertise, born of a bone- deep love for racing and meticulous preparation.
The result was encapsulated in the unbeatable line of the great Hugh McIlvanney, who wrote: ‘His admirers are convinced that had he been on the rails at Balaclava he would have kept pace with the Charge of the Light Brigade, listing the fallers in precise order and describing the riders’ injuries before they hit the ground.’ O’Sullevan made it sound so effortless, but he promised himself more than once that he would never again submit his nerves to commentate on the Grand National. ‘I found it so devastatingly frightening,’ he said. ‘It would be a terrible thing to misinterpret the race.’
In fact, like David Coleman in athletics, O’Sullevan was a wonderful reader of a race. He made his own card of the colours, but still went into the weighing room to see that the owners had not had changed shades at the last moment.
This was no laughing matter in the 1970s when there were 20 registered shades of green alone — almond, apple, bottle, dark, emerald, grass, Irish, jade, lead, light, lime, Lincoln, moss, myrtle, olive, pale, pea, rifle, sage and sea.
But he always seemed to call it right, whether hailing Liverpool’s ‘ hats off ’ reception to Red Rum in 1977 or describing ‘the National that surely isn’t’, when two false starts caused the void race in 1993. O’Sullevan was redolent of the BBC’s golden era when their commentators were the voices of their sports.
Coleman, a master of much else besides athletics, Henry Longhurst in golf, Murray Walker in motor racing, Dan Maskell in tennis and Bill McLaren in rugby. From the coat tails of that more idiosyncratic age, only Peter Alliss is still broadcasting, and very well, no matter what some humourless observers may recently have said.
Like Alliss, there was a certain drollery about O’Sullevan. When in retirement the National Hunt Chase at the Cheltenham Festival was renamed after him, he said: ‘Appropriately, it’s the oldest race at the meeting.’
Also of that BBC school was Benaud, another great of the microphone who died this year.
At the end of the 1956 Ashes tour Benaud decided to learn the art of broadcasting by spending three weeks training with the BBC. He was assigned to follow O’Sullevan at Newbury. O’Sullevan told him not to say a word, take notes and jot down any questions. Then, when the day’s work was over, they would go for a drink and Benaud could ask away
BENAuD counted O’Sullevan as a hero for the rest of his life. The demands of their jobs were different — a quick race as against a languid day’s cricket — but both excelled in never using a superfluous word. What a contrast to so much prattling on our television screens today.
By the arithmetic of these things his commentaries regularly broke ill-tidings to people with a pecuniary interest in any race they were watching. Nobody has ever delivered so much bad news so tastefully.