SPECTATOR SPORT
Creators of England
Simon Barnes
AND so your guest from abroad wants to touch the heart of England, to reach out and grasp something of the essential rural dream, the English myth, the green and pleasant land. Morris dancing? Too con- trived. The perfect English pub? Too hard to find. A walk in the countryside? None left, it's all green desert.
So what to do? Simple. Give your guest 15 minutes alone with Test Match Special, the broadcast that cannot be heard on radio, only on the wireless. Test Match Spe- cial, the ball-by-ball radio cricket commen- tary, celebrates its 40th birthday this sea- son. For four decades on its small but ever- shifting corner of the airwaves, the church clock has stood at ten to three, there has been honey still for tea, there has been a breathless hush in the close, and the cake- stealers have flickered to and fro, to and fro — Oh my Johnston and my Arlott long ago.
There was a time when the only way to watch cricket at home was to do so with the television sound turned down and the radio commentary turned high. I used to do that myself. No one on television was going to say, 'That ball went through Boycott's defence like a bullet through a hole in a Henry Moore.'
But then Arlott was a genius, and after he retired it was never the same, though it was still greatly loved, because Brian John- ston took over as the programme's domi- nant voice. Test Match Special survives, despite the death of both these men, and remains a deeply-loved thing.
I got fed up with it after Arlott left. I never greatly cared for Johnston, you see: self-indulgent, I thought, silly. Still less did I care for the big dorm japery he later indulged in with Jonathan Agnew. This is very grudging and carping of me, I know, but I suppose there are two classes of humankind, those who think that a spoof letter in the name of Hugh Jarce is hilari- ous, and those who do not.
But I do Johnston a disservice. Though not so profound a man as Arlott, he also possessed extraordinary gifts as a broad- caster. What matters is personality, the ability to inspire continuing affection and trust, a quality of vividness. Arlott was bril- liant, Johnston extremely good in his own way, but together they were extraordinary. They were greater than the sum of their two parts.
Between them they created a world, called it England and made the listener their co-conspirator. Not that they con- spired together, exactly; they were antithet- ical types of British life. Arlott represented the toiling peasantry, the rural roots of the game and of the country; Johnston repre- sented the gentry. This was ever a match between the squire's team and the village, with the usual twist that the peasant was smarter than the silly-ass squire.
Both these were largely assumed roles: Arlott was Basingstoke, not deep country, and Johnston was a professional broadcast- er, not an aristocrat. But the roles suited them and their subject. Arlott was a glori- ous word-spinner with a voice that smelt of fresh-cut grass; Johnston was able to spread about him all the cheering nonsense of a P.G. Wodehouse book. (I mean book, not character, for Wodehouse was, before any- thing else, a master craftsman, one who did nothing by accident.) Johnston and Arlott were not friends, as was sometimes fondly imagined, but nor were they enemies, as has subsequently been reported. They shared a deep roman- ticism about England: Johnston about his English schoolboyhood, Arlott about English rural life, not as it was, but as it should have been. It was not opposition, it was an English symbiosis.
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