Can Anyone Hear Me? Read Free Page B

a standard delaying tactic to put the annoying Englishman on the back foot.
Wednesday 25 November 1981
    Play was well under way and we still had no contact with the outside world, when Tony gave me some excellent advice. He muttered that Henry Blofeld had found that a well-timed outburst of indignation and even rage was sometimes quite effective in these parts.
    Amazingly, it worked. Within seconds of demanding angrily to speak to the man in charge of communications in Bombay, I was actually speaking to London, where Christopher Martin-Jenkins had been filling time manfully, with readings from a series of telexed scores from the BBC’s man in Delhi, Mark Tully.
    As regards the advice about the flash of temper, it’s worth noting that while such tactics are occasionally effective in India, they are thoroughly counter-productive in other places, notably the Caribbean.
    England’s win by five wickets in that first one-day international in 1981 was to be their last in India on that tour. Again it is a measure of the way things have changed that I interviewed the captain, Keith Fletcher, in the dressing room after the game. It was the only remotely peaceful place on the ground. While such an entry was always strictly on the captain’s invitation, it became quite normal on that and my next tour of India.
    Asdusk fell on Ahmedabad that November evening in 1981, with a rabble at his dressing room door, Keith Fletcher was a fairly contented man. That would change over the following weeks, but just then we could look forward to the comforts of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, to which we were all bound that night, there to prepare for the first Test Match.
    As a result of my experience in Ahmedabad, my most urgent mission when we arrived in Bombay was to visit the Overseas Communications Service and go through all our line bookings for the tour with them. These were, after all, the people who had claimed that we had no bookings. Disarmingly, they produced all the paperwork we had exchanged via British Telecom. It seemed they were just reluctant to believe it until they had actually seen someone from the BBC. It certainly taught me a valuable lesson for all future tours: to start with this kind of personal contact. While I cannot claim that everything always worked like clockwork thereafter, it did help immeasurably.
    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.
Thursday26 November 1981
    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.
    â€˜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