An Evening with Johnners (12 page)

PART TWO

An Evening With JOHNNERS

And now, back to the show
…

T
hanks for coming back!

Just before I talk about cricket, can I tell you a story about the Pope. Do you mind?

The Pope went to Ireland about five years ago and his plane was approaching Dublin when it was diverted to Shannon because of crosswinds. Waiting at Dublin to meet the Pope was a glistening white Rolls-Royce, in the charge of a chauffeur called Paddy Murphy.

They got on to Paddy and said, ‘Drive like mad to Shannon. The Pope’s plane has been diverted and you must be there when he arrives.’ So he raced to Shannon, the Pope’s plane flew in, and the Pope came down the steps and kissed the ground, as he always does. Then he looked up, and his eyes gleamed when he saw this
wonderful
white Rolls-Royce. He went up to the driver and said, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Paddy Murphy, your Holiness.’

‘Right, Paddy,’ said the Pope. ‘You get in the back. I’m going to drive.’

So the Pope set off and he was doing seventy, eighty, ninety miles an hour down the narrow Irish roads, when suddenly –
‘weeh, wah, weeh, wah’
– a police car signalled him to stop.

‘Can I see your licence, sir?’ said the policeman.

‘Certainly,’ said the Pope – he always carries one in his vestments – and handed it over.

‘The officer said, ‘Thank you very much, sir,’ and
withdrew
out of his hearing to ring up his superintendent. ‘Super,’ he said, ‘we’re in trouble here. I’ve found a very, very, very important man’s car going at ninety miles per hour. What action am I going to take?’

The super said, ‘Well, how important is he? More important than Terry Wogan? Is he more important than the Prime Minister, than royalty?’

‘Yes,’ said the officer, ‘I think he must be.’

So the superintendent said, ‘What’s his name?’

‘I don’t know what his name is, but he must be very, very important. He’s being driven by the Pope!’

I
told you that I did the first twenty-four years after the war on television and I worked with lovely people like Peter West, and Richie Benaud, who came and learnt his trade with us. He learnt very well, didn’t he? He’s jolly good!

And, of course, dear old Denis Compton. Denis,
remember
, was the vaguest man there has ever been, and still is. He never remembers a single invitation, never arrives on time, always forgot his box or his bat or his pads, but went out and made a hundred with everybody else’s equipment.

About twenty-three years ago, Middlesex were giving a birthday party for him – his fiftieth birthday.
Champagne
corks were popping in the Middlesex office up at Lord’s when the telephone rang and they said, ‘It’s for you, Denis.’

He went, and came back looking a bit rum.

‘Well, who was it, Denis?’ they said.

‘It’s my mother,’ said Denis. ‘She says I’m only forty-nine!’

R
ight,
Test Match Special.
As I’ve said, I’ve been lucky all my life, and I was very lucky to get into
Test Match Special.
I did the twenty-four years on the telly, up to 1970, and then they got fed up with all my bad jokes and thought they would get in some Test players to do the
commentary
– which is very sensible, they do it marvellously. Luckily, I went straight into
Test Match Special
and have been there ever since.

It’s a lovely programme to do, because we go and watch cricket like any of you do, with friends. If someone says, ‘Have a little drink,’ we might have a small one, or if someone has heard a good story, we might tell it. I hope we never miss a ball, but we have
fun
and that’s the great thing to me about cricket.

The remarkable thing is that a lot of our commentary
boxes wouldn’t pass the Factory Act. They’re very hot and stuffy and crowded, and yet I’ve never seen a single
quarrel
in one for forty-eight summers and I’ve never had one.Which is remarkable because we’re all extroverts – you’ve got to be to be a commentator – and we’re all different.

Of course, the commentary boxes aren’t made much better by old Fred [Trueman] arriving in the morning, smoking an enormous pipe. He fills the box with tobacco smoke! It’s a bit better after lunch because he goes round the boxes and has lunch with various people and he always comes back smoking a cigar. We always say his cigars are Adam & Eve cigars – when he’s ’ad ’em, we ’eave!

B
ut the great thing is, we do have fun, and we hope we get that fun through the microphone. You can’t do this without wonderful people in the box, and I’ll tell you about one or two of them.

Sadly we have lost two very important ones, but one’s still going strong – the great Jim Swanton, who, as you know, commentated before the war and even went out to South Africa and did a commentary on the Test match there. Jim was a marvellous commentator on both radio and on television and a great summariser, on television especially. Of course, he’s written for years for the
Cricketer
and the
Daily Telegraph
and he still writes.

So he’s in great form, in his mid-eighties, and he still plays the odd round of golf. His ambition was to be a Second World War golfer – out in thirty-nine, back in forty-five!

On tours, though, he was a bit pompous. He used to stay with Governor Generals and arrive at the ground with a flag on the car! In fact, when he was on
Desert Island Discs
, Roy Plomley said, ‘Mr Swanton, how do you think you would cope with being on a desert island?’

And Jim said, ‘It depends who the Governor General was!’

He’s a great talker, and I rang up his wife the other day and said, ‘How’s Jim?’

She said, ‘I haven’t spoken to him for about three and a half days.’

‘Really,’ I said, ‘has he been away?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I didn’t like to interrupt!’

He was always very keen on the differential between the amateur and the professional. He thought it was a good thing. But I think he carried it a bit far when he refused to drive in the same car as his chauffeur!

We used to pull Jim Swanton’s leg unmercifully. I’ll just give you two examples.

One happened at Canterbury in 1963, when Colin Cowdrey had hurt his wrist at Lord’s and was helping us with the commentary. Peter Richardson was captaining Kent and we arranged with him to pull Mr Swanton’s leg.
Jim’s got quite a deep voice, so we said, ‘When we start batting in the morning, and Mr Swanton comes on, we’ll wave a handkerchief from on top of our scaffolding.’

So this happened and I was doing the commentary and said, ‘I see Peter Richardson is just going up to speak to the umpire. I’ll hand over now to Jim Swanton.’

And Jim said, ‘Well, I don’t know what’s going on. He’s pointing towards us. It’s probably some small boys playing down below. Quite right!’

By arrangement with us, Peter spoke to Bill Copson, the umpire, who then walked towards us. When he was about fifty yards from our scaffolding, he cupped his hands and said, ‘Will you stop that booming noise up there. It’s putting the batsmen off!’

Of course, Colin said, ‘I didn’t quite hear that, Bill. Could you say it again?’ Poor old Jim!