Test Match Special

Test Match Special. I love Test Match Special

Steel drum calypso music, sugar on my lips. The crack of leather on willow and the gentle murmuring of a kindly old man. Streaming sunlight. Am I on a Caribbean beach?

No. It is something like 1994. I am at my grandfather’s council house at “the Nook” (a part of South Shields: my maternal grandparents were thus called “Nook Nana and Granda”; my dad’s parents were “Nina Nana and Granda” because they had a garrulous cockatoo called Nina”). For some reason Nook Nana is not there - since I’ve been left with Nook Granda it stands to reason that she is off out with my mother, not surprising for a woman who went out nightclubbing well into her eighties. Nook Granda, a veteran of the Durham Light Infantry’s campaigns in North Africa (he had driven Monty once) and Burma, and who had worked in the shipyards all his peacetime adulthood, was entirely out of his depth in a kitchen. The upshot was this: afternoons with Granda meant sugar sandwiches. They’re exactly what they sound like. White bread, white sugar. Fold.

Granda in his chair: he was very hairy but with a big bald patch, so he reminded me of the Chimpanzees from the PG tips adverts. Me on the floor playing with Tara the Alsatian, or with some toy cars. Sugar sandwiches and cricket. Test Match Special. The very meaning of peace.

Yes I love test cricket itself: the elegance of it, the grace, the long patches of nothing, the instants of drama. A day out at Chester-le-Street, Edgbaston, the Oval or whichever. But listening to it on the radio is something else entirely.

Radio cricket started in the 1920s, but even then the BBC thought that ball-by-ball coverage of a cricket match might be a bit much. In the 1950s, Robert Cecil Hudson - I hope he had the ‘tache his name, nationality and period of history imply - proposed deadtime on Radio 3 be used for ball-by-ball cricket commentary. Thus did TMS grow into its current form; it remained a fixture on Radio 3 medium wave until 1992.

I love hearing the antipodean English, the protipodean English, the sub-continental and the Caribbean, the African English. I I love the unlikely stats and wondering who on Earth kept track of them. I love listening back to Brain Johnson suffocating on his giggles after Jonathan Agnew’s comment on Ian Botham not getting his leg over. And the light hearted antics. And the Queen sending a cake to the commentary box. love the long anecdotes, the aimless reflections on cricket of decades gone.

It’s not really the cricket that makes me love it. I suppose it’s a sentiment, held deep down, that if people are slowly whacking balls about on manicured pitches, but breaking for tea no matter what, and jovial, polite commentators are sitting, watching, murmuring along, in temperate as in tropical climes, with lengthy digressions as single runs are ground out, then all must be right with the world.

Royal Navy submariners are told that the absence of the Today programme heralds the downfall of humanity. I know that if I were 30,000 leagues under the sea in a sardine can, there’s only one broadcast I’d be praying to hear, and only one sort of sandwich I’d be dreaming of.

Test Match Special. I love Test Match Special.