Can Anyone Hear Me? (3 page)

In fact, generally on all my early tours, the first thing to do on arrival anywhere was to make contact with the people who were going to help us get on the air. The problem in some places was identifying the crucial person who was actually going to make it work. In India I would go to the local All India Radio station, there to be introduced to the station manager and his chief engineer, sometimes together, but more usually separately in their offices, in which I would be given a mandatory refreshment – tea in the northern half of the country and coffee in the south, but always syrupy sweet.

After visiting the OCS in Bombay, I went to the All India Radio station, not far from the Test match ground, the Wankhede Stadium.

I found myself ushered into the local commentators' pre-Test meeting. We sat around the station controller's office, sipping impossibly sweet tea, until the controller called us to silence.

‘Gentlemen, we must not be biased,' was his only pronouncement. We all nodded sagely at this great wisdom and the meeting broke up.

I did manage to get a meeting with the chief engineer and some of his staff, but the BBC requirements seemed to baffle them. In particular the need for a telephone for reports at the same time as the commentary was going out was hard to grasp.

I was reminded of the advice I had received on the flight out, that in India women are much more helpful than men, when I met our allocated engineer, a lady called Veena. She seemed to understand immediately what we needed and took me back to the ground to show me where everything would be tomorrow.

The cricket on this tour was fairly dire, though on the first day Ian Botham enlivened proceedings by scything through the Indian batting.

Our glassed-in commentary box gave us little of the noise and atmosphere of the occasion, but with tiered rows of chairs in the back of the box, we found we were acquiring a crowd of our own.

‘It's
filling up nicely,' was Tony Lewis' comment, as he drew my attention to the massed ranks.

I thought I ought to make enquiries as to who these people were. The first I asked announced herself as the wife of the Director General of All India Radio. I withdrew.

India won that low-scoring first Test by 138 runs, thanks to the spin bowling of Dilip Doshi in the first innings and the seam and swing of Kapil Dev and Madan Lal in the second. In a six-Test series, this was to be the only positive result.

The Test match ended a day and a half early. This had one benefit, in that the BBC, worried about the quality of the microphones we had been furnished with by AIR, had despatched a pair of their own to me. Little did we know when the arrangement was being made, what a rigmarole would ensue.

To start with, I had to meet our local shipping agent at the hotel on the rest day, an occasion which gained me a nickname that has stuck for a generation.

I agreed to meet the agent in the hotel foyer and, while I waited for him, a porter came past carrying a board with the name ‘Mr Bartex' on it. Michael Carey of the Daily Telegraph was keeping me company and, with an eye for a crossword clue, pointed out that this was an anagram of ‘Baxter'. And sure enough, it turned out that it was me he was paging on behalf of the shipping agent.

The shipping agent is at his wits end. He asked me to supply him with a letter for the customs, to reassure them that the microphones will be re-exported after use, which I did. But later
in the day he reported that his efforts had not been successful and they remain in their custody. Things were more confused by the customs' apparent belief that, like All India Radio, the BBC is a government ministry. It looks as if I shall have to go and see them as soon as the Test Match ends.

And so it turned out.

I took a taxi to the shipping agent's small office near the airport. The man himself was fulsome in his apologies for the red tape over which he had no control. He took me to the cargo terminal. I picked up the tone of the place from the sight of a pig leaving the building as I arrived.

We entered an office where four rows of seats were fully occupied in front of a man at a desk. We went to the front immediately and the nearest members of the crowd, who might have thought they were at the head of the queue, were ushered away with the peremptory order, ‘Wait half an hour.'

My friend the agent (who never did reveal his name) showed him the shipping order.

‘Passport,' he snapped.

I showed it.

‘Has he a TBRE?'

My friend looked at me enquiringly – and rather pointlessly, because he had asked me the same question several times earlier and I still had no idea what a TBRE was.

Not
for the first time I asked, ‘What is a TBRE?'

‘Downstairs,' was all the answer I got.

In another office on the floor below we were issued with a form and I sat in the corridor to fill it in with the agent's help. He took it away with the instruction, ‘Wait five minutes.'

As good as his word, he was back half an hour later, brandishing a wodge of paper. ‘We go to customs hall.'

To get into that we had to call at another office, where the passport and the wodge had to be examined. The paper was thrust back into my hand with the explanation, ‘TBRE!'

Two yards further on, a man in khaki uniform wanted to see it all again. And then we were in the bonded warehouse. There was an ominous line of eight desks, each manned by an official in white uniform. Happily, we by-passed the first seven desks. The man at the eighth predictably started with, ‘Passport.' Then, ‘TBRE.'

‘Can you tell me what it stands for, please?'

‘Tourist Baggage for Re-Export.'

He stamped the paperwork noisily, but that was not the end of it. We did have to visit each of the other seven desks after all, where the same procedure was gone through. By now, to slow the whole business down, we had to talk cricket at each desk, too.

At the end of the line I was suddenly presented with the package. To my dismay, I had to go back to desk number one to open it. Two microphones of a type I wasn't familiar with lay inside, with accompanying attachments.

‘What
is this?' said the customs officer, pointing at something that looked like a large screw.

‘God knows,' said I, though I did better with the next piece he chose. ‘Ah, that's a windshield.'

The manifest had to be signed and then taken for further stamps all the way down the line of desks again, though the atmosphere was much more friendly. After all, I was becoming an old friend and it appeared that all these people had nothing else on today apart from stamping my paperwork. ‘What do you think of Kapil Dev?' was the most frequently asked question.

‘We still have the register to sign,' said my friend, when we seemed to have finished. Even that took four desks to complete.

As we emerged after over three hours in the building, he asked, ‘Why did you ask for them to be sent?'

‘I didn't.'

And with that I was just in time to join my colleagues arriving at the airport for our evening flight to Hyderabad.

In my early days on these tours, the concept of back-to-back Test matches had not yet surfaced, so between Tests we would usually be in smaller cities for matches against regional teams, which would take place in some interesting venues. The early call on the All India Radio station would be quite a revelation.

In Hyderabad on this 1981–82 tour, I found the AIR station was in the splendidly appointed former guest house of the Nizam, the erstwhile princely ruler, immediately across the
road from another of his old palaces, which now housed the local government offices. Several years of broadcasters' occupation had taken some of the lustre off the guest house, but you could get some idea of its previous glory.

Here I met what we believed to be the world's first female cricket commentator. She was Chandra Nayudu, daughter of India's first cricket captain, C. K. Nayudu. She was elegant and softly spoken and contemplating the start of what was only her fourth commentary in five years.

The next day I found myself invited to sit alongside her in the AIR commentary box to help her with the names of the England fielders.

Much later in the tour, we were in Indore in the centre of India, where the local AIR station was more prosaic than the Nizam's guest house. I found that I was expected there.

The radio station was a bungalow on the outskirts of the town and at its gates I found the entire staff drawn up for my inspection. I had to pass down the line like visiting royalty inspecting a guard of honour.

Our day at the Nehru Stadium was enlivened by the quickest century I have ever seen. Ian Botham had made it pretty clear to the press the previous evening that he reckoned playing in these provincial matches (this one was against Central Zone) was a waste of time and warned that he intended to alleviate his boredom with some fireworks. He reached three figures from 48 balls and his whole innings of 122 occupied only 55 balls. It contained seven sixes and quite
a few of his sixteen fours fell only just short of the boundary rope.

I now had a good story to report at the close of play and so I made my way up to the AIR commentary box on the floor above the press box. For half an hour we tried unsuccessfully to raise London. After that time the engineers suggested that we would be better off trying from their studios at the radio station.

Arriving at the AIR bungalow I was proudly told, ‘We have allocated you our best studio. This is our music studio.' However, when I saw this jewel in their crown it became apparent that I would not have any two-way communication from the studio itself, but only from the control room telephone before I went in. The first part of the line to London had just been established, that being the rather shaky microwave link to Delhi. The operator there enjoyed an over-indulgence of their habitual ‘hello, hello' routine and then, when I was at last speaking to London, interrupted several times with the command, ‘Speak to London,' until he received a good blast of Anglo Saxon from me, which hugely amused the engineers at my end and shut him up for good. After this I was taken into the pride of AIR Indore – the Music Studio.

I was shown into a large, square, heavily carpeted room. It had not a stick of furniture in it, save for a microphone on a short stand in the middle of the floor. The intention was that I should sit on the floor – presumably cross-legged, as if playing the sitar – to deliver my reports. I described the scene to the London studio, before embarking on my accounts of Botham's remarkable innings.

As
soon as we arrived in Jammu, up in India's north-west, close to the border with Pakistan, I went with a party of journalists to locate the central telegraph office in the town.

The CTO was a remarkably small office with bat-wing doors like a Wild West saloon. Even the browbeating given to the staff by the Press Association's man looked unlikely to bear much fruit.

At the huge, wide-open concrete saucer of the Maulana Azad Stadium, things looked a little more promising. In the open compound of the stand set aside for the press there were a couple of telephones. The newspaper correspondents were less impressed. There were telex operators, but no telex machines. The press's tour leader is Peter Smith.

‘We were promised three machines,' he complained.

‘Oh sir, there are three machines. One telex three kilometres away and two men with bicycles.'

I may have chuckled at that, but I was in just as bad a position. Those telephones flattered to deceive and we two from the BBC went for four days without ever making contact with London. It was only later that I discovered that London had been kept up-to-date by reports from the celebrated Delhi correspondent, Mark Tully. One writer's copy did get through – to a clothing factory in Lancashire, where it was discovered when the staff returned after the weekend.

I did have one moment of excitement when the press box phone
rang on the second afternoon. The operator handed me the receiver and a faint voice asked me to record a report. I did so rapidly, terrified of losing the line, but when I asked to speak to the editor afterwards, the voice at the other end told me I was getting faint in a way that made me suspicious. I looked round the press box and saw the
Daily Mirror
's seat empty. Sure enough within a minute, emerging from the pavilion on the far side of the ground and whistling in triumph, came their correspondent, Peter Laker. In fairness, he had done pretty well to get a call through over even that short distance.

Following that match, an all-day coach journey in convoy with the players' bus and police vehicles took us to Jullunder in the Punjab for the second one-day international. Even with a police escort and the supposed high status of a visiting national cricket team, negotiating the dues to be paid at the state border we had to cross caused a major hold-up.

Jullunder raised further transport-related problems. These started early on the morning of the match, as I set off for the ground, which I had not had the chance to inspect the day before.

In the rather foggy dawn I left the hotel on, in the absence of any taxis, the back of a cycle rickshaw propelled – slowly – by an emaciated old chap. ‘To the cricket stadium, please,' I placed my request.

Half an hour later I was a little surprised, therefore, when we arrived at the bus station. Thankfully a women waiting there spoke good enough English to understand me and translated my desired destination to the rider.

Unfortunately
it became apparent that the bus station is on the opposite side of town from the Bishen Bedi Stadium, just recently renamed from having been known as Burlton Park.

I was beginning to feel concerned about my frail driver, as well as feeling that I wouldn't mind a go on the pedals to warm myself up on that distinctly chilly morning. We did cause considerable amusement, though, for the occupants of the England team bus as it overtook us en route for the ground. At least it was an indication that we were now on the right road.