Can Anyone Hear Me? (2 page)

A
track wound between some large bushes. Brightly coloured shamiana canopies stretched over bamboo poles appeared through the undergrowth. And between them I could make out figures clothed in white. Thus, in an unlikely clearing in the grounds of a maharaja's palace, I caught my first glimpse of an England cricket team playing abroad.

It was November 1981 and my predominant emotion was one of relief as I came down the track in the grounds of Baroda's Motibaug Palace, 36 frustrating hours after my arrival in India. What I found was a scene almost reminiscent of Arundel. For the previous day and a half I had felt fairly isolated, so to be suddenly surrounded by the familiar faces of the travelling press corps was a wonderful moment.

I had landed at Bombay at two in the morning the previous day. It was a great cultural shock, one that even my previous experiences of such places as Singapore, South Arabia and Kenya had not fully prepared me for.

Everywhere there was a babble of noise and more people than you could imagine. Hands grabbed for my luggage to get me to a taxi – I supposed – and eventually I found myself in the back of a grubby, antique vehicle. Knowing that my flight on to Baroda was not scheduled till the middle of the afternoon, I found a none-too-flashy hotel near the airport.

After a reasonable sleep, I made my way to the domestic terminal
to check that all was well with my flight, only to be told that it had left at seven o'clock in the morning. ‘The change was well publicised,' I was told.

‘Not in Hertfordshire,' I informed the lady at the desk. She agreed to book me on the next morning's flight.

I checked back into my hotel (where travellers experiencing such problems seemed to come as no surprise) for an extra night. After trying unsuccessfully to raise my colleague Don Mosey, already in Baroda, on the phone, I sent him a telex message to explain my delayed arrival, though the hotel operator helping me held out little hope. ‘The lines are unclear,' was his technical explanation. (When I did eventually catch up with Don, he showed me a completely incomprehensible message he had been delivered, which certainly fulfilled the description ‘unclear', though it
had at least given him a clue that I might have arrived in the country.)

Six a.m. found me at the airport, confronting an enquiry desk, where I was told that there was a two-and-a-half hour delay to my flight to Baroda. Would I ever get there?

More doubts were raised when I was informed that my reservation was only on a standby basis. I was 29th on the waiting list and it was not promised to be a very large aircraft.

Fortunately my determination to get on that flight got me to the front of the rowdy crowd around the check-in counter as a very softly-spoken Indian Airlines official read swiftly down the list, and at my name I gave a loud ‘Yes!' and thrust my case onto the scales.

It
was the first time the BBC had sent a producer on a cricket tour, but it was not principally production that had been the instigator of my being dispatched to India.

The decision to send me had come after what had been a momentous year for cricket. Probably until England's Ashes victory in 2005, 1981 was the pre-eminent year for cricket gaining the attention of the wider public. It had started with Ian Botham in command in the Caribbean, where his tour was blighted by a succession of troubles. Two players had to return home early with medical problems and the replacement for one of them was to cause a Test match to be cancelled.

When Bob Willis pulled out after the first Test, the Surrey bowler, Robin Jackman, was sent out to take his place. These were the days of South Africa's sporting isolation over the evils of apartheid and Jackman, with a South African wife, spent most of his English winters in that country. He had warned the Test and County Cricket Board of this situation when he was put on the reserve list for the tour and had been told that it was not a problem. But, as he headed for Guyana to join the team, politicians in the region started to stir the pot.

Don Mosey, the often irascible ‘Cock of the North' (as he liked to describe his position as North of England outside broadcasts producer in the BBC's Manchester office) had been the BBC's man on the tour. He was not officially the cricket correspondent, but, since Christopher Martin-Jenkins had left to edit the
Cricketer
magazine, he had fulfilled much of that role.

A Yorkshireman, Don had come to the BBC in the sixties from being the northern cricket correspondent of the
Daily Mail
. He had been on the staff for ten years when he at last got the chance to join the commentary team on
Test Match Special
. His bombast meant that on the whole his
London-based colleagues would avoid trespassing on ‘his patch' as much as possible, a state of affairs which suited Don, who professed a disdain of ‘southern softies' in general and, as I was to find to my cost, public school educated ones in particular. A journalist of the old school, he relished the English language, a trait that was to manifest itself when I got him to do close-of-play summaries, which he accomplished brilliantly. For all his grumbling, he also relished touring.

When the Guyanese government refused to allow Jackman to play in their country in 1981 because of those South African connections, and with England stating their position as ‘accept the team as a whole or we don't take part', Mosey found himself in the most difficult part of the Caribbean for communications, making his coverage of the unfolding news story difficult.

That eased with the move to Barbados, after the Jackman furore had caused cancellation of the second Test, but then came another incident – the sudden death of the team's coach, Ken Barrington, in the middle of a Test match. At the same time, rumours abounded about the captain, Botham's, extra-curricular activities.

In London the BBC radio newsroom were not overjoyed with Don's coverage. Some of the problems, like the difficulties of getting through to London from Guyana, were of course not his fault. But in the case of Barrington's death, they felt that he should have tipped them off as a warning, even with an embargo, instead of waiting until he was sure the family had been told before he made contact. That approach meant that he was not the first to tell them. When they rang him up to let him know the rumour of the death and he said casually that he already knew, they were not pleased.

The
West Indies tour was followed by a sensational Ashes series in England, when Mike Brearley was recalled to the colours to inspire England and their hero, Botham, to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

With cricket such hot news, when the head of Radio Sport announced that Mosey would be our man covering the winter's tour of India, the news department expressed their concern and began to consider sending a reporter of their own.

It was the sports editor, Iain Thomas, who came up with a solution. Peter Baxter could go to India to take the news reports off Don's hands and also relieve Don of the worry of getting
Test Match Special
on the air. The newsroom were happy with that and Don only heard the latter part of the arrangement and probably reckoned he'd been given a bag-carrier. He was content at least for me to do all the player interviews, though he sneered at the modern thirst for them. The only exception to this was Geoffrey Boycott, whom Don insisted on interviewing himself, claiming that Boycott would only talk to him.

There had to be some matrimonial consultation before I accepted the invitation to tour, but in early November 1981 I embarked on an Air India jumbo to Bombay. Sitting next to a charming Indian doctor from New York, I received a few tips about India during the journey, one of the most useful of which was that women would always be more helpful than men if you had a problem there.

Communications were my major concern, but in those darker days there was less pressure of expectation. Within the next ten years, television, with its own satellite technology bringing perfect sound and vision, would change that. Back in 1981 there were places where getting through at all was regarded as achievement enough.

We
relied a lot on hotel telephones and the hotel operators themselves quite clearly never expected to get through to London, which in those days, outside the big centres, might as well have been on the Moon. The print press wrote their stories on portable typewriters and then had them telexed to their newspapers from camp telegraph offices at the cricket grounds or the central telegraph office in any town.

On a few occasions, Mosey and I tried splitting forces, with him trying to get through from the ground, while I did the same from the hotel. Indeed, after that first game in Baroda, while he waited with the press bus for the last of the journalists to file their copy before moving on to Ahmedabad, our next port of call, I was allowed to hitch a ride on the team coach to get there more quickly and try my luck in getting through from the new hotel.

It will sound remarkable to today's touring cricket press that I could do that, but we lived much more in each other's pockets then, particularly in touring the sub-continent, and that sharing of the team bus was not a unique experience on that tour. Team and press luggage was moved from place to place as one consignment. Of course both parties, particularly the press, were much smaller in number than they were to become 20 years later. After the Test matches started, we picked up a three-man BBC television news crew, one of whom was permanently shuttling backwards and forwards to either Bombay or Delhi, the only places from which they could send their stories.

Anyway, the team's generosity on this occasion brought me no luck and even on the morning of the one-day international in Ahmedabad – my first
TMS
production abroad – the prospect for communications looked bleak. Although I had found the commentary box on my visit to the ground the day
before, it had been utterly barren. As we were dependant on All India Radio for all our technical support, I made contact with them and was told that no equipment would be arriving until the morning.

To my relief, when I turned up the next day, the box was unrecognisable. Radio engineers bustled about, setting up equipment and, for all that it looked past its best, this was an encouraging sign. I found a telephone in the telegraph office that was set up for the benefit of the press and sent a telex to the BBC sports room to give them the number as a safety measure. (I later discovered that the message actually never got there.)

Mosey arrived from the hotel and Tony Lewis from the airport, having flown into Bombay overnight, so our commentary team was assembling as planned. Gradually, however, my confidence in the communications started to wane. The game started and still we had made no contact with London. I called out in vain, with the antique headphones pressed to my ears, straining for a response. At long last I heard it: a faint and distant voice calling out, ‘Hello, hello.'

This was a breakthrough. I called back, excitedly, ‘Hello Bombay! Can you put me through to London, please?'

The faint voice persisted, ‘Hello, hello.'

‘Come on, Bombay,' I said, ‘We should have been on the air an hour ago.'

The voice failed to acknowledge me, though continued to call out, to my increasing frustration.

Now Tony Lewis made his first contribution to the tour, tapping me on the shoulder to indicate the turbaned engineer sitting immediately behind me and calling out, ‘Hello, hello.'

The message was conveyed to me that we had no line bookings.
As I had all the paperwork, I knew this was wrong, but this was the word from the Overseas Communications Service in Bombay. Over subsequent tours of the sub-continent I became used to this as a standard delaying tactic to put the annoying Englishman on the back foot.

Play was well under way and we still had no contact with the outside world, when Tony gave me some excellent advice. He muttered that Henry Blofeld had found that a well-timed outburst of indignation and even rage was sometimes quite effective in these parts.

Amazingly, it worked. Within seconds of demanding angrily to speak to the man in charge of communications in Bombay, I was actually speaking to London, where Christopher Martin-Jenkins had been filling time manfully, with readings from a series of telexed scores from the BBC's man in Delhi, Mark Tully.

As regards the advice about the flash of temper, it's worth noting that while such tactics are occasionally effective in India, they are thoroughly counter-productive in other places, notably the Caribbean.

England's win by five wickets in that first one-day international in 1981 was to be their last in India on that tour. Again it is a measure of the way things have changed that I interviewed the captain, Keith Fletcher, in the dressing room after the game. It was the only remotely peaceful place on the ground. While such an entry was always strictly on the captain's invitation, it became quite normal on that and my next tour of India.

As
dusk fell on Ahmedabad that November evening in 1981, with a rabble at his dressing room door, Keith Fletcher was a fairly contented man. That would change over the following weeks, but just then we could look forward to the comforts of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, to which we were all bound that night, there to prepare for the first Test Match.

As a result of my experience in Ahmedabad, my most urgent mission when we arrived in Bombay was to visit the Overseas Communications Service and go through all our line bookings for the tour with them. These were, after all, the people who had claimed that we had no bookings. Disarmingly, they produced all the paperwork we had exchanged via British Telecom. It seemed they were just reluctant to believe it until they had actually seen someone from the BBC. It certainly taught me a valuable lesson for all future tours: to start with this kind of personal contact. While I cannot claim that everything always worked like clockwork thereafter, it did help immeasurably.