Thought for the day: 27/08/2009
Us listeners of the Test Match Special can be a defensive lot. And do you wonder why?
We’re facing the incursion of attention-deficit cricket into our beloved game and the constant nagging worry of Blowers being stood down, only to be replaced by some inappropriately shouty football commentator from that station just along the dial. When anyone with half a brain can see that it should be Vic Marks.
We’re watching producer Adam Mountford with eagle eyes to make sure he fulfils his promise of Leaving It Alone rather than staging some heist to make it more ‘relevant’ to people that don’t care about it in the first place. And no-one seems to appreciate how terribly important cricket on the long-wave frequency is, in case we need to follow a Test match in the car, in the bath, in the garden and in the many other locations still unknown to digital technology.
Which is why Will Buckley’s recent knocking copy in The Observer has gone down about as well as a wet fart in a communal bath-tub . We don’t fancy linking to it but, just as a quick recap, the man wrote a quite horribly snide and jeering piece accusing Aggers of a rush of middle-aged hormones to the head while interviewing Lily Allen recently.
Ms Allen, for those who don’t know, is a popular music sensation possessing the kind of charming youthful provocativeness that enjoys the shock effects of nipples and the word ‘fuck’. But she’s also a keen environmental activist who also campaigns on child protection and social justice issues, and it’s evident that the ‘look at me’ stage in her career is already on the wane in favour of truly substantive work.
But The Nurdler must actually confess to having a foot in both camps here. Not only are we rigorous TMS listeners, but we’re not at all averse to the music of Lily Allen. We own her albums and play them, especially the first one that sounds like it was produced by Terry Hall and Jerry Dammers.
The occupants of Nurdler Towers are old enough to remember Ms Allen’s father Keith (and his brother Kevin) appearing as stalwarts of The Comic Strip Presents in the early eighties, alongside people like French & Saunders, Adrian Edmondson, Rik Mayall, Robbie Coltrane and Alexei Sayle. One of the highlights of the interview for us was the incongruity of learning that this hard man of TV and film was a keen club cricketer.
As the whole drawn-out process of setting up the interview played out, we did worry that Aggers may have taken on more than he could handle this time. But Lily Allen, bless her, treated TMS with all the respect its listeners know it deserves.
Will Buckley, by contrast, did not treat TMS with respect and then compounded his mistake in a half-baked, self-serving faux apology by claiming to be a fan himself. Fiddlesticks, sir. You should know that true listeners take the injunction to regard Aggers, CMJ, Blowers and their guests as we would the spectators in the adjacent deck chairs quite literally. You have been sneering at our friends and for that you are unlikely to be forgiven.
But we will not waste pixels and attention on this blackguard. Here’s the thing that’s been really been puzzling The Nurdler.
Why is it that if Aggers interviews a couple of young male actors, 21-year-old Tom Felton and 20-year-old Daniel Radcliffe, during The Ashes coverage then it is seen as completely unremarkable? The Roman Empire is not in decline. The licence fee is not being wasted. Aggers is not unjustly accused of having a mid-life crisis.
But a 24-year-old female pop star steps into the box and suddenly all hell breaks loose. That should give us pause for thought.
As for Aggers being unfamiliar with his guest, we would direct enquirers to the recent David Mitchell interview. Not an hour before, our genial host is on Twitter asking for ideas for questions to a comedian he’s not particularly familiar with. The result is nevertheless an interesting and insightful interview that gets Mitchell to admit that as a schoolboy he regarded a cricket ball as an offensive weapon, and to discuss his tendency towards obsessive-compulsiveness.
The Nurdler says: a resounding hurrah for Felton, Radcliffe and Allen, all three. That these men and women in their early 20s are enjoying the Test game and properly appreciating TMS is the best news we’ve heard in ages.
Let’s hope that lots and lots of their unsung peers are doing the same. But picking and choosing who’s “in the club” and allowed to publicly express a liking for and knowledge of Test cricket, and who’s considered unsuitable, won’t do the job.
TMS is never, never elitist or exclusive, despite the proliferation of public schoolboys and Blowers being posher than the Queen. That’s a big part of its charm. It’s for anyone and everyone who likes cricket. And the newly-minted accessibility of all three of the regular commentators plus Alison Mitchell, Oliver Brett, Phil Tuffnell and scorer Malcolm Ashton on Twitter has strengthened the relationship with listeners no end.
You might bear that in mind in future, Mr Buckley.
Tags: Daniel Radcliffe, Henry Blofeld, Jonathan Agnew, Lily Allen, Test Match Special, Tom Felton, Vic Marks, View from the Boundary
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 08:21 and is filed under Test Match Special. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
