TALKS ON CRICKET TESTS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLII, Issue 20613, 30 December 1936, Page 6

TALKS ON CRICKET TESTS

OBJECTION VOICED POST-MORTEM COMMENTS Some caustic remarks about the broadcast comments on the Test cricket matches between England and Australia, are made by the radio writer in “The Sydney/ Bulletin.” “Last week the Test match," he writes, “and what an unconscionable amount of twaddle does get into the air in the name of Cricket! Not the descriptions of play; this listener will cheerfully hear those by the iiour, and they are not badly done. If they have a fault it is that by now some announcers have been at it long enough to have dropped into a formula. A little ingenuity, and every over could be something fresh, with—as in fact, it has—a character of its own. Another thing—cricket describers talk too much. They will gabble, and, gabbling, are often left floundering when the incident that counts happens. But, since they are describing action, which forces its own life on even the most stereotyped, they provide tiptop entertainment. In fact, there are few things better on the air than these cricket descriptions. Vic Richardson makes as good hearing as any. “The ‘commentators’ who reiiash the day’s play in the evenings are another kind of beastie. On the try-anything-once principle, this listener went through the ordeal of the complete talks of more than half a dozen of them one evening. They were nearly all well-known cricket names, and what dull business they nearly all made of it! Some performers would seem to indicate that a cricket career must be one of the soundest of all trainings for tiie pulpit. With one or two exceptions they treated the game as anything but a game. The solemnity was unbelievable. Certainly nobody on Mars, or any other unhappy place where they don’t have cricket, could possibly gather that such ponderous stuff had anything to do with a game. “Post-Mortem Commentating" “What they seem to overlook is that such “commentating” being in the nature of post-mortem and of no practical value whatever, can have merit only if it is entertainment. The truth probably is that most of these chaps, though inestimable cricketers of their day, simply have no gift as entertainers. A striking exception is A. E. R. Gilligan, heard speaking from Brisbane on the night all this was suffered. Gilligan is an admirable entertainer. Apart from his subject matter altogether, it is a pleasure to listen to him. As he represented it, the play of the day was not only play in a game but in a game jolly well worth playing. He obviously enjoys cricket as much as a spectator as ever he did on the field. It is a friendly matter with him, a good bit of fun—anything but a text for a sermon full of direful doubts and prophetic forebodings. He has humour, an uncommonly likeable manner, an excellent broadcasting voice. He is a polished speaker and he takes his time.

“Failure in that last is a trouble with most of the others. They are not all fast speakers, but they speak without pause, filling in what should be effective pauses with such cliches of the air as “generally speaking,” “as a matter of fact,” “consequently” (eleven syllables), “must not be forgotten” and “indeed." These things give a listener an uncomfortable feeling that he is being buttonholed again by the very club bore he has only gone home to avoid.

“Not only among cricket “commentators” is gabbling rife. Tearing along at a hand-gallop is rather common in our broadcasting, with chaps who read news and weather from national stations fairly easy winners. They’d leave the Modem Major-General of Ivan Menzies staggered by their pace. This listener found an extraordinary contrast to them and their stereotyped news reading in an astonishing quarter —a chap conducting a "children’s newspaper” from 2GB. Instead of galloped fragments of mostly minor news items, he dealt on this particular evening with three things that were, just then, news at its biggest—the affair of the King, the ill-health of the Pope and the French Ministerial pronouncement that France would back Britain to the last frog. These things he did not merely gabble, but interpreted understandingly, sympathetically and intelligently. He was not dogmatic; he simply explained. One day all broadcast news will be put over like this.”