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Howzat! A brief history of cricket on the BBC

2017-11-22T11:09:57+00:00

Jonathan Agnew and Phil Tufnell commentating on Test Match Special, which celebrated its 60th anniversary this summer

As the Ashes series begins in Brisbane, we look at some of the people who have brought cricket to BBC TV and radio.

From instructional radio programming and short match reports in the early years of the BBC, to live coverage throughout the day on both television and radio, the BBC listings show how much coverage of cricket has changed over the decades.

A quintessentially British sport, cricket traces its origins back hundreds of years. The sport was once banned for interfering with archery practice, according to a 1933 Radio Times article. But cricket has won in the long term - there are only 204 references to archery in BBC Genome, while cricket listings number thousands. The schedules are more interested in boundaries than in bullseyes...

Left: A 1933 Radio Times article about Edward IV making cricket illegal. Right: In 1937 Radio Times printed a guide to fielding positions to help listeners follow the commentary

John Arlott was one of the original voices of cricket on BBC radio. He spent a number of years as a policeman in his native Hampshire before moving into broadcasting: a radio address to King George VI he made on behalf of the police on VE Day 1945 helped him make the transition.

Arlott's broadcasting career straddled his passions of poetry and cricket, which he often allowed to overlap. Cricket was the inspiration for this 1945 listing of poetry and prose, while his cricket commentaries were known for being articulate and rhythmical, but he wasn’t unnecessarily florid with his language. Writing in The Nightwatchman magazine, journalist Simon Barnes described “reticence and understatement as aspects of Arlott’s talents”.

Test Match Special was given a strip across two pages of the Radio Times for its first broadcast

Arlott was one of the commentators on Test Match Special when it launched in 1957 on the Third Programme, and remained on the team until the centenary Ashes Test match of 1980. His retirement led to a number of tribute programmes, and in a 2003 edition of Desert Island Discs, long-time colleague Henry Blofeld recalled his experiences working with Arlott.

Blofeld’s first listing on Test Match Special was in 1972, and apart from a couple of years spent at Sky, he was a crucial part of Test Match Special until the end of summer 2017. When "Blowers" started on TMS it was broadcast on Radio 3, but it has had a number of homes in its 60-year history. In the mid-90s the programme moved to Radio 4 long wave, and since 2002 it has been broadcast uninterrupted on digital station BBC 5 Live Sports Extra. Having reached "60 not out", it feels the responsible cricketing thing to do is to go for the century.

BBC Sport takes a look at some of Henry Blofeld's best broadcasting moments

Cricketer Rachael Heyhoe Flint - a contemporary of Blofeld's - was a champion for greater coverage of women’s cricket in the second half of the 20th Century. She organised the first women’s World Cup in 1973 (two years before the first men's equivalent) which received some coverage on Radio 2. In 1983 Just After Four looked at her "one-woman campaign to put women's cricket on the map" and alongside Brian Johnston she discussed cricket on Woman’s Hour in 1993.

Heyhoe Flint was preceded by Marjorie Pollard, a hockey player who was an advocate for women's cricket in the early years of the BBC. A consummate sportswoman, she is believed to be the first person to play two different sports at The Oval in one year. In 1937 Pollard provided commentary for the first women's Test Match ever to be played in this country, two years after a special edition of Sports Talk in which she made the case for women’s cricket.

Coverage of Women’s cricket is now much more of a fixture on the BBC with Test Match Special covering every ball of the 2017 Women’s Ashes. A BBC Radio 5 live programme in October 2017 debated whether 2017 had been women's cricket's greatest year. On-air, Ebony Rainford-Brent and Alison Mitchell are regularly heard in the BBC commentary box.

Marjorie Pollard (right), seen here broadcasting at a women's hockey match in 1938, was also a regular commentator for women's cricket

It is nearly 80 years since Test match cricket was first broadcast on BBC television, although an early listing gave little fanfare with just these few lines in Radio Times. It was an important time for sport on television, as Wimbledon also made its TV debut in 1937. Coverage was far removed from what we are now used to, there could be no highlight packages or replays interwoven into the analysis. In the post-war years live cricket became a regular feature on television with future radio stalwart Brian Johnston presenting a look back at 200 years of cricket before a test against India in 1946. Johnston, known affectionately as Johnners, became the BBC’s first cricket correspondent in 1963. Test cricket was first shown in colour in 1968.

Brian Johnston spent much of his career as a television commentator before moving to Test Match Special.

Cricket gave the BBC television lots of schedule-filling content and home Test matches remained exclusively on the BBC until 1999, when Channel 4 won the rights. Channel 4 continued to show live cricket until the end of the 2005 Ashes victory over Australia. But after cricket was removed from the list of "crown jewels" sporting events reserved for terrestrial TV, Sky acquired the rights in 2006, from which point live test cricket has not been available on terrestrial TV. In the intervening years, the BBC has shown highlights from some World Cups and an away Ashes series in 2006/07.

As I approach stumps at the end of this blog, the story of cricket on the BBC is far from over. In recent seasons the BBC Sport website has broadcast live commentary of every match in county cricket. Since 2016 the BBC have shown match clips and highlights online, and live cricket will also return to BBC TV from 2020.

BBC TV's Summer Holiday

2017-07-25T16:16:06+00:00

The cover of the last Radio Times Television Supplement, from July 1937. The final programme before TV's three week 'holiday' was Review of Revues, which included Valerie Hobson, later the wife of John Profumo MP...

Starting eighty years ago today, in the summer of 1937, television took a holiday for three weeks. The service was still in its infancy, and engineers at Alexandra Palace needed to carry out maintenance on equipment which they were still working out how to use.

Radio Times had given fair warning to the handful of television viewers then tuning in. The issue published on 10 July announced: "INTERIM: In order that an overhaul and certain internal adjustments may be carried out at Alexandra Palace, transmissions will be suspended for three weeks, beginning on Monday, July 26. There will, however, be television transmissions from Wimbledon of the Davis Cup on July 26 and Tuesday, July 27, between 3pm and 4pm, with an extension until 4.30pm if necessary.” The tennis was transmitted as promised, but in fact transmissions continued for the whole period, albeit only of test programmes.

Television had been going for just under a year by summer 1937. Though the official launch was in November 1936, there was a special transmission to the annual RadiOlympia exhibition in August that year, followed by a few weeks of test programmes. All of these alternated the Baird and Marconi-EMI television systems, which the government’s Television Advisory Committee had decided should be trialled for up to six months before the final system was chosen.

By the end of January 1937 however, it was clear to the BBC and the Advisory Committee that although it had some good features, the Baird system, involving separate Spotlight studio (for close-ups) and Intermediate Film (for long shots), was too impractical to take any further. Marconi-EMI, with its higher resolution picture of 405 lines, and more flexible working method, became the sole television format.

That said, there were still issues to be resolved, and so it was decided to take the single studio (Studio A) then in use out of service for a few weeks. The break also saw the end of the Radio Times Television Supplement, which was glossy, lavishly illustrated and expensive to produce; indeed there were no television listings at all in the magazine during the three weeks.

Jasmine Bligh, one of the original trio of television announcers, seen in an off-screen still from August 1937. She was distantly related to Captain Bligh of 'Mutiny on the Bounty' fame

In terms of content and viewing hours, television at this time was still very limited in scope: there was only an hour’s transmission in the afternoon and the same in the evening. During the ‘holiday’ period, films started to be shown in the morning, initially cinema newsreels, and something called Ace Magazine. These gave electrical retailers something to show when demonstrating sets in the morning, even if only during a one-hour window.

This period also saw the debut of the BBC Demonstration Film, which would endure until the mid-1950s in a constantly-changing form. As the recording of electronic pictures, even onto film, had not yet been satisfactorily achieved, demonstration films were made as conventional films, recreating selected items with the original performers. Apart from still photographs and a couple of short excerpts from actual transmissions which have survived, demonstration films are about the only idea we have of what the earliest television looked like.

There was no television transmitted on Saturday 31 July, or Bank Holiday Monday, 2 August. There was also no transmission on Sunday 1 August - or any other Sunday (until April 1938). Sundays in the 1920s and 1930s were regarded as being very special by the BBC, under the influence of the strictly religious Director General, Sir John Reith. As Reith was no fan of television generally, it is perhaps not surprising that Sunday was television’s regular day off, and this only changed a couple of months before Reith left the BBC.

Adagio dancers the Bega Four performing on an edition of Cabaret Cartoons in 1937, while being drawn by cartoonist Harry Rutherford (right), who had studied alongside L.S. Lowry

There were occasional technical breakdowns, though it is not recorded whether these were spontaneous or the result of the maintenance work. There were no evening transmissions during this period, and the afternoon programmes were transmitted earlier than normal. On the last day of the ‘holiday’ period, Saturday 14 August, the service closed down at midday.

Television returned to normal at 3pm the following Monday, August 16. Jasmine Bligh was the announcer, and the first show, after a newsreel, was a ‘mixed programme’ consisting of Indian dances by Mayura Vincent, songs by John Thompson, and an adapted Tolstoy story “Capital Punishment”, starring Charles Lefeaux. After an ‘interest’ film, Bugle from Blue Grass, there was more drama, starring Jean Forbes-Robertson in Scenes from Romeo and Juliet, with Michael Redgrave as Romeo, although he was not credited in Radio Times. (Unfortunately for technical reasons these listings are not presently on the Genome database.)

Evening programmes included veteran actor Bransby Williams in his celebrated monologues, a talk on commercial art, and another newsreel. The transmission concluded with Cabaret Cartoons, with Harry Rutherford doing lightning sketches of the performers, including singer Ingrid Linck, ‘upside-down dancers’ the Topsy-Turvey Two, and adagio dancers the Bega Four. (Two scheduled acts, Trudi Binar and The Grip Four, did not appear.) The programme was directed by the television programme organiser, Cecil Madden.

And so television carried on. It never again took a ‘holiday’ – unless you count the Second World War, the 1947 Fuel Crisis, and the occasional strike…