The ongoing Test series in Australia, and moments snatched in front of the television during it, have reminded me of the golden pleasures of my childhood, when the very idea of being able to watch live cricket on TV seemed an impossible fantasy, and one had to glue one’s ears to static-ridden radio commentaries, letting one’s imagination do the rest. A recent biography of one of the most famous radio commentators of all time has helped revive those recollections.

To millions of cricket fans cut off by geography and circumstance from Test matches in England, Brian Johnston’s was a welcome and instantly recognisable voice, bearing glad tidings from the greensward. Over more than four decades with the BBC, “Johnners” commentated on Test Matches in his familiar plummy warble, his trademark a rare combination of insight, irreverence and irrelevance. By the end of his 81 years, Brian Johnston was, as his authorised biographer, Tim Heald, puts it, “an institution as famous as and rather more loved than the BBC”.

Unnecessary details

Unfortunately, Mr. Heald’s is very much a work for those who loved the voice and want to know everything humanly possible about the man it emerged from. For those whose enjoyment of Brian Johnston was based principally on his association with cricket, Mr. Heald’s earnest retracing of the family tree (and the family coffee-bush), not to mention a dozen pages on his clothes, shoes, ties and favourite foods (including the recipe for his very own “Guard’s Pudding”), may prove a little irksome. In this biography, even more than in Johnners’ increasingly self-indulgent turns on “Test Match Special”, the cricket is outweighed by the chocolate cake.

Born at the start of the 1912 cricket season into a well-off, upper-middle-class family, Brian Johnston’s childhood was marred by the accidental drowning in 1922 of his father, a highly-decorated war hero, and his mother’s subsequent unsuccessful marriage to the man who had failed to rescue him. Though this episode leads Mr. Heald to some gentle psychologising, it is the only whiff of tragedy in Johnners’ life. There followed prep school (where an end-of-term report noted that he “talked too much”), Eton (where he captained the second XI and kept wicket passably, unluckily missing out on selection for the school team), an unsuccessful stint in the family’s coffee business in Brazil (from which he was invalided out by acute peripheral neuritis, a disease that, he later joked, normally afflicts only pregnant women and alcoholics) and service with the Grenadier Guards in World War II (where his “untiring determination and cheerfulness under fire”, according to the citation, won him the Military Cross). Then, demobbed and jobless, he ran into a couple of Old Etonians, a chance encounter that led to an invitation to join the BBC.

True calling

Johnston worked for the BBC staff from 1946-72, his career including many imaginative reporting stunts, such as broadcasting from inside a pillar-box as the letters dropped on his head (he stretched a hand out through the slot to take the last one) and conducting a daylight robbery to report on his own arrest. But he was principally a cricket commentator, and indeed, from 1963, the BBC’s first official cricket correspondent; after his compulsory retirement at the age of 60, he freelanced as a cricket commentator on radio till his death nearly 22 years later. He also acquired domestic celebrity status as a versatile TV announcer, especially for ceremonial and royal occasions. Cricket sometimes intruded even there: Johnners famously described the procession at the Prince of Wales’ wedding going “up the steps into the pavilion” instead of “into the cathedral”.

Listening to that distinctively English voice on shortwave half a world away, I thought of Brian Johnston as a Wodehousean figure, and the biography reveals startling parallels with the life of the great humorist: public school without scars, ability (but not excellence) at cricket, unsuccessful stint in international commerce, and great success in a profession he came to dominate, while marvelling that he should be paid for doing something he so hugely enjoyed. (John Woodcock told the author that “he never thought of Brian as a professional but as the very best sort of amateur”, adding, in words that apply equally to Wodehouse, that “Brian liked to appear effortless and casual but only did so as the result of considerable homework.”) Like Wodehouse, too, Johnston reveale

Source: The Hindu