Evening Standard: Jun 98

My remarks about sports commentators in this space last week have produced a furious response.

The comments were perceived as critical, if not downright offensive. In which case, readers have demanded, why was no mention made of Henry Blofeld ?

The answer, of course, is that what I had to say was actually genial, temperate and helpful - mentioning Blofeld would have spoiled everything.

Here is a voice beside which the sound of a fingernail scratching a blackboard is akin to the song of the meadowlark. A posh voice with the occasional base notes that often precede a stealthy burp. Henry uses it with the precision that mediaeval torturers brought to the use of pincers and the red hot spike.

Henry has elocution the way other people have anxiety and his unique pronunciation is all the more excruciating for being so clearly audible.

Let me select but one example. He calls the lovely old game of cricket "krikkit" to rhyme with "ticket" which is what he calls the piece of pay-pah you need to gain admission to a krikkit ground.

For those who have never heard Henry through emigration or some such device for weaselling out of the experience, the best way to envisage, his style is to picture him watching play through a lorgnette of the kind that was brandished by the Regency fops upon whom he appears to have modelled himself.

"Oh, my dear old thing!" he regularly chortles to his colleagues in the commentary box and you can imagine him flouncing a hankie at them, just plucked from his lace cuff or donklng them playfully over the head with his sliver-topped cane.

His decision to address people in such a singular way is matched by his choice of what is fit for Inclusion in a krikkit commentary. His big enthusiasms are bird-life - "There's a super pidge-inn at mid-orf" - and any public transport that crosses his eye-line,

Avian fixation

At Headlngley the avian fixation caused him to describe the lanky West Indian, Curtley Ambrose, as an animated stork. You could hear Fred Trueman, who was sharing the box with him, bite straight through the stem of his pipe.

Fred's astonishment continued long after Blofeld had stepped down. to choose brocade for his new knee breeches, perhaps.

"'Ave you ever seen an animated stork?" Fred asked another of the commentators wonderingly. "Mind you," he went on. "he finds the buses up here very attractive, I've known him to spot a good-lookln' train but an attractive bus ... " His voice trailed off as If he could foresee the News of the World coming round one day.

It was to escape this surreal ambience that, for the Lord's match, I tried the new Telecom-type dial-in alternatives. One outfit was offering commentary from such as Brian Close, known to be a man of few words, and Farokh Engineer, whom you'd assume to be pretty practical. A rival organisation were so down to earth that its operatives were anonymous, at least when I dialled.

I was getting on well with these unvarnished variants to TV and the wyerliss when I noticed some print, tiny as midge droppings, beneath the ads for them in the paper - five pence for eight seconds, peak time. I dropped the receiver as if the red hot spike was being thrust up through the sofa. Very dear, old thing!