An Evening with Johnners (14 page)

The Brigadier’s face relaxed in a smile, only to freeze with horror as Fred said, ‘Aye, and with second I’ll pin you against flippin’ sightscreen!’

T
hen we have this funny thing in the box about
chocolate
cake. It is silly, really, but someone once sent me a cake about sixteen years ago for my birthday and, perhaps unwisely, I said on the radio, ‘Thank you very much for that delicious cake.’

Since then, they have arrived in droves. We were
averaging
three or four a day last year! Ray Illingworth’s always good for one: he comes in at teatime. We give some to old ladies’ homes and children, we eat some ourselves, and we always have about eight visitors in the box – you can hear them chattering often – so we give them some cake.

People take so much trouble. Small boys wait at the back of the pavilion and say, ‘My mum’s baked this cake
for you, Mr Johnston.’ It’s very touching and they do it beautifully.

They make wonderful cricket scenes in icing on them. I’m president of a cricket club in Glamorgan – I’m
president
of about ten different funny clubs – and they come up to Lord’s every year with a cake for me. They always present it to me on the Saturday and this year they had a coloured icing replica of a famous picture in Lord’s Museum, which shows W.G. Grace batting  and a fielder stooping down to field in front of the old stand, where the Warner Stand is now. King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra are seen walking around, with Lillie Langtry, the King’s mistress, in the crowd. It’s a famous picture.

They did a replica of it in colour. It was marvellous; too good to eat and too good to cut, so we put it in our freezer, and when people came to our house, we didn’t say, ‘Come and look at this picture on the wall.’ We took them into the kitchen!

So it is rather stupid but people are kind, and when people are kind you just say, ‘Thank you.’

O
f course, we played a silly trick on Alan McGilvray a few years ago. Incidentally, I think Alan McGilvray was the least biased and the fairest of all commentators. He was a very, very good commentator and he knew his cricket, because he captained New South Wales in the thirties, when people like Jack Fingleton and Bill O’Reilly were under him, and even Don Bradman on occasion.

So he knew his cricket, but he didn’t always
understand
our jokes. At Lord’s, several years ago, I had cut some cake up into slices on the desk alongside me and I was commentating, when I saw him come in. I pointed to the cake and he nodded, and I went on yap, yapping away and saw him take a slice, and I said, ‘That ball just goes off the edge of the bat and drops in front of first slip …’

I saw Alan put it in his mouth and I said, ‘We’ll ask Alan McGilvray if he thought it was a catch.’ He went
pfffft
. There were crumbs everywhere! Silly really!

I’
m lucky at having been on air at great moments like winning the Ashes in 1953, when I was on television at The Oval – ‘It’s the Ashes! It’s the Ashes!’ – and again when Ray Illingworth got the Ashes back in 1970/71 in Australia, I was broadcasting back to England.

But luckily for me, I wasn’t on when the first streaker came on at Lord’s. Remember the male streaker in 1975?
He ran on and did the splits over the stumps. Fortunately, John Arlott was on and he described it brilliantly,
wittily
and gently. He said everything which needed saying; he didn’t hide what he could see but he did it in a way that I couldn’t possibly have done. I’d have got the sack, but he didn’t.

There was a Yorkshireman who used to send me rhymes about cricket and he sent me a rhyme, which said:

I
often wake up and think, Gosh! You’ve been talking for years about a bit of wood hitting a little bit of leather! But there are rewards for it. One of the rewards is the reactions that I get from people. Fred and I were talking once about our dogs. He had a big sheepdog called William and I had a little Yorkie called Mini.

He said, ‘How’s Mini?’ and I said, ‘I’m very worried about her. We’ve had to put her in a dog hotel for the first time because my wife’s away and our housekeeper’s away. When you leave a dog in one of those hotels, they look
at you as if to say, “You’re never coming back for me. I’m being left!” It’s terrible, and I can’t get that picture out of my mind. Still, I must go on with the commentary.’

We went on commentating and, about an hour later, there was a knock on the commentary box door. Outside was a man with a dozen red carnations and inside them was a little note saying, ‘It’s all right. All well here. I know you’re coming back for me. Love and licks, Mini.’

A lady in Hounslow had heard me and rung up a florist in Leeds!

S
o that sort of thing makes it worthwhile. All the
thousands
of letters we get make it worthwhile. They don’t always understand us. Some of the letters are marvellous and there are two I always keep on file.

Once I said that Freddie Titmus was coming on to bowl and I added, ‘He’s got two short legs, one of them square.’ A woman wrote in, ‘No need to be rude about people’s disabilities!’

On another occasion Ken Barrington had made one hundred and eleven and I said, ‘He’s batting very well now. He’s a bit lucky – he was dropped when two.’ In came a letter saying, ‘Mothers should be more careful with their babies!’

And you won’t believe this. Once, I was doing a
commentary on the annual Whitsun match at Lord’s. Middlesex always used to play Sussex, and Middlesex were batting, captained by John Warr. They had made about three hundred for three by tea and I handed back to the studio for the tea interval. They came back to me after tea with, ‘Over now to Brian Johnston for the latest news at Lord’s.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘the latest news at Lord’s is that Warr’s declared.’ And, you’ve got to believe it, the BBC duty officer said an old lady rang up to see who it was against!

B
ut you see, it doesn’t worry me if I don’t make myself understood, because there are other people in this world far higher than me who don’t make themselves
understood
. I’ll give you two examples.

Take a judge. You’d think a judge would make himself understood, but this judge was about to sentence a chap who had been found guilty and said, ‘Anything you want to say, my man, before I sentence you?’

‘Sweet FA, my lord!’ said the man.

The judge turned to his clerk and said, ‘What did he say?’

‘Sweet FA, my lord,’ said the clerk.

‘No,’ said the judge, ‘he definitely said something. I saw him move his lips!’

W
hat about bishops? You’d think bishops would make themselves understood. These two bishops were up at one of these synods in London, where they go to Church House for a different subject each day. They are having a little tea and crumpets in front of the fire at the Athenaeum, working out the subject for the next day and how they’re going to deal with it. A difficult one for bishops. Premarital sex.