It’s May 1941 and you’re a German soldier relaxing with a cheeky bottle of local French wine, tuning into your shortwave radio. Suddenly, on a station called Gustav Siegfried Eins, you are greeted by the voice of Der Chef. This foul-mouthed, trenchant, Prussian military veteran is railing against the feeble-mindedness and effete ineffectuality of the Nazi high command. They’re soft. They’re corrupt. They’re incompetent. Most importantly they’re betraying the noble ideals of the mighty Führer with their lascivious behaviour and failure to get on with the vital job of subjugating all Europe and bringing it under the worthy yoke of Nazi Germany. What he says shocks you and undermines your faith in your superiors. Your morale is sapped. Your suspicion of every command and every order given to you grows with every broadcast from Der Chef. Only it turns out you’re actually hearing the voice of Peter Seckelmann, a journalist and crime-thriller writer who got the hell out of Nazi Germany in 1938, headed straight to London, and is now working for your enemy’s counter-intelligence team.
Seckelmann made more than 700 of these disruptive broadcasts and can truly lay claim to being, if not the godfather of fake news – that’s probably Herodotus, with honourable mentions for Julius Caesar and the Emperor Constantine – then certainly the most noble exponent of its art.
Radio is a particularly effective medium for promulgating fake news. There is a reassuring authority that we just can’t help but ascribe to that disembodied voice. You can’t see its owner scratching at his earwax. You have no idea he’s wearing a 10-year-old Simpsons T-shirt, a pair of mouldy combat shorts and a face that hasn’t seen a razor for four days (unless Geoffrey Boycott somewhat disloyally points this out on air).
As for radio cricket commentary, I mean, do you honestly think those pigeons, buses, helicopters and men dressed up as Cardinal Richelieu are all real? It’s hard enough identifying Afghanistan’s debutant lower middle-order batsman lurking at midwicket from 100 metres away without spotting individual members of the crowd amid a multi-coloured sea of cagoules, umbrellas, tartan rugs and ersatz nuns.
“Paint a picture,” our producer on TMS, Adam Mountford, begs us. But when the picture is an incoherent mess that Jackson Pollock would have rejected for being too formlessly bewildering, naturally we sometimes stray into fantasy. This is easier than you might think. My first commentaries when I was a child were all vocal articulations of my wildest inner cricketing fantasies. Initially I was the hero taking centre stage. Lillee, Thomson, Roberts, Holding, Hadlee and Imran Khan were all left breathless as I bestrode the greenswards of Manchester, Melbourne and Multan like the great nine-year-old colossus the world knew me to be. Impossibly attractive girls would watch on, gasping in wide-eyed, almost tearful amazement at my prodigious feats, proclaiming their love under their breath and vowing to shower me with gifts as diverse as a lifetime supply of chocolate cigarettes and five boxes of toy soldiers from the 7th Armoured Division, the “Desert Rats”.
As time wore on and the struggle to suspend my disbelief turned into a cause so lost that it rivalled the revival of Blind Date on ITV, my fantasy commentaries instead focused on actual cricketers and the voices I used were actual commentators. John Arlott would be purring over “another quite remarkable double-hundred from David Gower. Perhaps Michelangelo really had this man in mind five centuries ago as he carved out from purest marble his greatest masterpiece. For there is nothing so exquisite, nothing so graceful and nothing so intoxicating, not only on this blessed isle but across the seven seas and all the very continents of the earth, than this modern, tousle-haired David.”
Arlott was always on commentary for the really big made-up moments, but occasionally Fred Trueman, choking on his pipe, would have to concede that Botham’s record-breaking spell of eight for one was beyond criticism and maybe every now and then he should be given the leeway to stray from the tediously repeated virtues of “line and length”.
Naturally England always won and usually from impossible positions, winning being important but nothing like as important as the devastation wreaked on our shocked opponents, whose hubris from the previous day was now coming back to haunt them. Arlott again would speculate that “there might be the merest hint of a tear in Kim Hughes’ eye, which will doubtless become a free-flowing stream and then a mighty cataract this evening as he sits alone in his hotel, contemplating the obliteration of his hopes, his expectations and his very nation at the hands of Botham.” The fact that occasionally these things came to pass simply encouraged ever wilder flights of fancy.
So entrenched would I become in my fantasy world that I began to resent the commentators for actually calling the game the way it was genuinely happening. Instead of reporting that Gower “has got a thick edge and it’s flown to gully where Yallop has taken a stunning catch,” could Blowers just not lie and tell us that the ball had evaded the fielder’s grasp and flown down to the boundary for another four runs? The commentators had the power to make me happy or miserable. Why did they insist on using this power in such a malign way?
But now that I have made my (scarcely more believable) way into the actual, real TMS commentary box I have come to appreciate why Blowers et al are compelled to call the game, for the most part, as it truthfully unfolds. While it’s perfectly easy to invent the odd skein of geese flying by or a retired army major in the crowd, unfortunately the truth of the action lies very much in the eye of the beholder, and as you behold it with those eyes you find yourself irresistibly drawn to say what you see.
What happens, though, if you, the commentator, are not actually the beholder? What if, instead, you are reading words from cables sent 10,000 miles away and are expected to create a coherent ball-by-ball cricket commentary from fragmentary pieces of written data?
This was the task that faced former Australia player Alan Fairfax when he was employed by French radio station Poste Parisien in 1932 to produce “condensed” commentary of the Bodyline series cobbled together from cables sent through from Australia. He didn’t pretend to be at the actual matches but he did deliver two hours of commentary on each day at around 6am English time to coincide with the end of play in Australia.
Live sports commentary on the BBC had begun in 1927 when Captain Teddy Wakelam called the England v Wales rugby international but, although the Reverend Frank Gillingham made his famous broadcast of the Essex v New Zealand match later that year, Wakelam and his bosses at the BBC were highly sceptical about the merits of live ball-by-ball cricket commentary. All the reasons why we now come to think of cricket as being perfectly suited to radio – the longueurs, the opportunity to explore not just the game itself but to embark on lengthy discursive rambles about the state of the nation, the quality of the lunches and the influence of Birmingham’s architecture on Tolkien’s depictions of Middle Earth – were seen as impossible impediments to a quality broadcast.
As a result, the first commentaries were largely summaries of the previous half-hour’s play delivered in five minutes before handing back to the studio for some dance music. But interest in the Bodyline series was so immense that a more comprehensive and immersive service was demanded, hence Fairfax and his condensed commentaries from Paris.
Over the next six years running up to the second world war, sport really took off on radio, both in the UK and crucially in Australia where a number of commercial stations competed with their own ball-by-ball commentaries.
Bradman’s celebrity was so enormous that Australians demanded instant access to his every deed. There was very real concern among the cricket authorities that this new-found access to the action would impact on crowds who would no longer need to trudge to the match to experience the game. But the broadcasters could not be stopped. This was an age when no one paid for rights. (Although it’s true that in the early 1930s Lord’s managed to prevent broadcasting from within the ground. Howard Marshall, the BBC cricket man of the day, would have to hotfoot it to a flat near the ground where a microphone was installed and compete with the upstairs occupant practising his scales on the piano.)
The increasing demand for up-to-the-minute reports and in-depth reporting meant that “condensed” commentary would no longer cut the mustard. So ABC in Australia devised an ingenious solution. For the 1938 tour of England, at the height of Don Bradman’s suffocating fame, they employed a team of commentators, transcribers and special effects men to bring ball-by-ball “synthetic” commentary to Australians roughly five minutes after the action had taken place on the other side of the world. Taking the methodology of condensed commentary to its logical conclusion, and building on techniques tried out during the 1934 tour of England, cables were sent to Australia at the end of every over with rudimentary information on each ball: who had bowled it, who had faced it, how many runs were scored.
Occasionally extra details such as whether it had been pulled through midwicket or driven down the ground would be added. A team of four would take the cables and interpret from the information which fielders were stationed where, producing a pictorial pitch map for the commentator to refer to. Another man would play a vinyl recording of appreciative crowd noises and try to get it to coincide with the rhythm of the commentator’s delivery.
The commentator himself, usually Alan McGilvray (who would appear on the BBC for every Ashes tour to England from 1948 until 1984), would thwack a pencil against a block of wood to simulate the noise of bat on ball. Video recordings are available on YouTube of the 1938 commentaries. The regularity with which McGilvray mistimes this elementary special effect, such that it takes place a full second after he’s described the stroke, is bafflingly bizarre. The whole enterprise is both quaintly naïve and technologically sophisticated for the times. If Heath Robinson had done cricket commentary this is exactly what it would have looked like.
McGilvray was not a commentator noted for his poetic style and he largely plays a very straight hand on these synthetic commentaries, allowing himself the merest of flourishes such as describing Bradman’s innings as “glorious”, but strictly speaking even this tame embellishment couldn’t possibly have been gathered from the written cables. Imagine what Henry Blofeld would have done in his place. The wiry, regal figure of George VI would undoubtedly have been gazing on accompanied by his most splendid wife. The gasholder at The Oval would have been heaving up and down like an operatic soprano’s chest and there would have been more pigeons than you’d have needed to produce a remake of Hitchcock’s The Birds at Trafalgar Square.
Furthermore, might you not have been tempted in McGilvray’s position to cut short Len Hutton’s epic 364 through the simple expedient of calling his dismissal?
I’m pretty certain that should I still be commentating in a post-apocalyptic landscape, ravaged by the excesses of the new Australian Reich, in which live television is no more and I’m calling the game from text messages, England will win every game. Jos Buttler will average 101 at a strike rate of 180 and Jimmy Anderson will still be breaking records aged 74. I’ll rail against the failures of the Australia players to whine sufficiently childishly at short-pitched bowling directed at their star batsman, hold their beer, and swear artlessly at Poms. I’ll have a thick bogan accent, start every sentence with “Look, you know mate” and I’ll introduce myself on every broadcast as “The Cobber”.
• This article appeared first in The Nightwatchman
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