Can Anyone Hear Me? Read Free Page A

expectation. Within the next ten years, television, with its own satellite technology bringing perfect sound and vision, would change that. Back in 1981 there were places where getting through at all was regarded as achievement enough.
    Werelied a lot on hotel telephones and the hotel operators themselves quite clearly never expected to get through to London, which in those days, outside the big centres, might as well have been on the Moon. The print press wrote their stories on portable typewriters and then had them telexed to their newspapers from camp telegraph offices at the cricket grounds or the central telegraph office in any town.
    On a few occasions, Mosey and I tried splitting forces, with him trying to get through from the ground, while I did the same from the hotel. Indeed, after that first game in Baroda, while he waited with the press bus for the last of the journalists to file their copy before moving on to Ahmedabad, our next port of call, I was allowed to hitch a ride on the team coach to get there more quickly and try my luck in getting through from the new hotel.
    It will sound remarkable to today’s touring cricket press that I could do that, but we lived much more in each other’s pockets then, particularly in touring the sub-continent, and that sharing of the team bus was not a unique experience on that tour. Team and press luggage was moved from place to place as one consignment. Of course both parties, particularly the press, were much smaller in number than they were to become 20 years later. After the Test matches started, we picked up a three-man BBC television news crew, one of whom was permanently shuttling backwards and forwards to either Bombay or Delhi, the only places from which they could send their stories.
    Anyway, the team’s generosity on this occasion brought me no luck and even on the morning of the one-day international in Ahmedabad – my first
TMS
production abroad – the prospect for communications looked bleak. Although I had found the commentary box on my visit to the ground the daybefore, it had been utterly barren. As we were dependant on All India Radio for all our technical support, I made contact with them and was told that no equipment would be arriving until the morning.
    To my relief, when I turned up the next day, the box was unrecognisable. Radio engineers bustled about, setting up equipment and, for all that it looked past its best, this was an encouraging sign. I found a telephone in the telegraph office that was set up for the benefit of the press and sent a telex to the BBC sports room to give them the number as a safety measure. (I later discovered that the message actually never got there.)
    Mosey arrived from the hotel and Tony Lewis from the airport, having flown into Bombay overnight, so our commentary team was assembling as planned. Gradually, however, my confidence in the communications started to wane. The game started and still we had made no contact with London. I called out in vain, with the antique headphones pressed to my ears, straining for a response. At long last I heard it: a faint and distant voice calling out, ‘Hello, hello.’
    This was a breakthrough. I called back, excitedly, ‘Hello Bombay! Can you put me through to London, please?’
    The faint voice persisted, ‘Hello, hello.’
    â€˜Come on, Bombay,’ I said, ‘We should have been on the air an hour ago.’
    The voice failed to acknowledge me, though continued to call out, to my increasing frustration.
    Now Tony Lewis made his first contribution to the tour, tapping me on the shoulder to indicate the turbaned engineer sitting immediately behind me and calling out, ‘Hello, hello.’
    The message was conveyed to me that we had no line bookings.As I had all the paperwork, I knew this was wrong, but this was the word from the Overseas Communications Service in Bombay. Over subsequent tours of the sub-continent I became used to this as