Aggers at daggers drawn over TMS
By Stephen Perry - 02/02/2007
In the world of radio, you don’t change a winning formula without risking the wrath of the listeners. But the TMS anchorman has revealed to Mature Times his serious concerns that the change of management control from Radio 4 to Radio FiveLive will threaten the character of one of Britain’s favourite institutions.
Aggers boyishly plonked himself down on the purple sofa, opposite the booking office, that neatly matched his sweater and blue jeans. Jonathan Agnew, or Aggers as he is known to fans of “Test Match Special” or TMS, was about to perform at the Courtyard Theatre in Hereford, and it must have seemed to him a very long way from the commentary box at Adelaide, Melbourne or Sydney.
He and his team are touring the country in a production entitled “Rain Stops Play”. The show, inspired by BBC Radio’s Test Match Special, started its run the day before in Salford and after sixteen performances will wind up on March 12th in Colchester. In the foyer the crowd of mostly balding and white haired men in fleeces were gradually gravitating to the bar. Their expectations? Possibly a dip into that comforting world that is “TMS”, where it’s safe and unchanging and where listeners send in their cakes and “Blowers” describes the intermittent passage of pigeons, buses and trains.
Cricket, regularly blighted by bad weather and lasting up to five days, of necessity has long periods where its commentators have only the past to illuminate the present. They are born raconteurs and can, if required, at the drop of a hat, recall an innings by Derek Randall in front of 75,000 at Melbourne or maybe the day David Gower, in his customarily disorganised manner, brought 12 men out onto the field of play and was then forced to dismiss one of his number by shouting out to him at the boundary “you’re dropped!”
But Aggers is not a happy man. After sixteen years on the programme these days the former Leicestershire and England fast bowler is the team captain of TMS or more correctly the BBC “cricket correspondent”, having succeeded “CMJ” (Christopher Martin Jenkins). He likes being number one because he says he’s bossy and he’s proud to be carrying the baton for the incomparable Brian Johnston. And perhaps for this reason he is all the more willing to speak out now about his grave concerns for the future of the programme.
Peter Baxter, who has been the programme’s producer since 1973 and a part of the team for forty of its fifty years, is retiring this year. Jonathan says that now TMS is funded and owned by BBC FiveLive and not Radio 4 his new bosses are eager to make the programme, as they see it, more “accessible”. There’s something Orwellian about the way he uses this word.
What does “accessible” mean? It seems there will almost certainly be some new commentators drafted in who have not spent their lives in and around cricket. Listeners will be aware that Simon Mann and Mark Saggers are already on the TMS second team and while they are highly competent, it is in football commentating and other sports that they have sharpened their teeth.
While not referring to them by name, Aggers made it clear that this state of affairs is not good enough. He explains that “the lynchpin of what has held everything together for the last fifty years has been the unquestionable knowledge the commentator has.
“They have to have a deep knowledge of the game and not just to know what happened five years ago in a one day international in Nagpur.
“They have to have lived, breathed and loved cricket and you have to have played the game. Brian Johnston only played for Eton’s second team - that was probably enough.”
But without these qualities in its commentators, he thinks the programme will lose its credibility. Wistfully he reflected that we miss Fred Trueman, who could go back to the nineteen thirties and forties and who told fascinating stories.
So if the new producer, as yet not named, decides to make wholesale team changes will Jonathan pick up his bat and walk? No, he has no intention of going anywhere, at least not without a fight. He says he’s an ambitious man and plans a long term future for himself in cricket journalism and wants “to take the programme on and attract more people to [it]”.
He will stand up for himself and evidently the struggle has already begun. He did not hesitate to tell me that he’s “very concerned about the future of TMS” even though this very indiscretion may ruffle a few feathers at the BBC. He reminded me that just as the authorities have to be very careful about how they modernise the game so does the BBC have to be careful about the changes it makes.
The England and Wales Cricket Board recently tried to introduce features into the sport that were aimed at ten-year olds. He warned the old guard that some of these innovations may drive away the very parents who would be the ones that would introduce their children to cricket in the first place. “Aim it at the parents and the kids will be there.” You could feel him bristling with indignation.
The sub-text is that changes to TMS may succeed in persuading some teenagers to listen to the programme that previously they found too fuddy-duddy but it would be at the expense of driving away the true, long term and devoted fans. This will happen over his dead body. Well, he didn’t quite say that but I knew that’s what he felt. He admits it is hard to find new characters. Oh dear, just imagine a future without Blowers and the bearded wonder, Bill Frindall! John Arlott and Johnners will be turning in their graves.
But that’s a battle to be continued slightly further into the future. Tonight Jonathan has an adoring audience to face and he’s looking forward to it. It’s fun and he knows everyone here will be knowledgeable. It’s much easier than giving after-dinner speeches, which he hates, where the audience may have drunk too much and if lucky give you passing notice for twenty minutes.
It’s different too from talking to a microphone in a commentary box. I asked him if he and his fellow commentators have to adjust their style when overseas and broadcasting to an audience back home who are lying half comatose in their beds, as opposed to broadcasting during the daylight hours in England. And they do. “Keep it mellow” is his byword.
He then describes how he makes a quick adjustment before he nips off to do a 20 minute stint with the BBC’s Australian equivalent, ABC, where he is a bit more “up” and feels the need to entertain. Jonathan reckons that on TMS at night they chatter quietly among themselves trying to avoid waking anyone up needlessly, only picking up the pace and noise levels when they have to. Some would say that’s not too often, then.
And of his colleagues, he describes Boycott as a “sound bite merchant”. Others are not just former players but also newspaper correspondents so they have good journalistic credentials. And does the volatile Boycott worry him when broadcasting live? No, but he has to keep him in line, to some extent. He says Geoffrey on air had “sacked” Duncan Fletcher (England’s coach) two weeks before the Ashes series began.
Jonathan believes his role is not to let him get away with remarks like that, by asking detailed questions about what would have happened then, who would have taken over and how would everything have been reorganised at such a late stage? This shuts up Boykes for a few minutes but he’s got his headline in all the newspapers and he knows it.
And who is his radio audience? If tonight’s crowd is any gauge, they are not too young. But Aggers doesn’t agree. He says he gets lots of e-mails from young people and women too. Well I should know that, given my wife’s affiliation to TMS. He thinks the programme’s demographics are very broad. Jolly good, but it’s difficult not to suspect most will qualify as Mature Times readers.
He claims he doesn’t take life too seriously. In spite of the cricket disaster he had a wonderful time in Australia with his wife. His real ambition is to fly a tour of Australia. He’s just got a pilot’s licence and would like to make a TV documentary interviewing strange farmers and landing on funny strips in the outback and visiting weird and wonderful places.
And then finding the time to cover the cricket, of course.