Friday, March 28, 2014

My hero / David Rayvern Allen on John Arlott

 

John Arlott commentating on the cricket match between Gloucestershire
 and the New Zealand touring side in 1949. Photograph: Haywood Magee


My hero: 

David Allen on John Arlott

John Arlott's Hampshire burr stood out like a marrow in an orchard of plums among the cut-glass vowels of postwar broadcasting


Friday 28 March 2014

T

he voice was unmistakable, the Hampshire burr that stood out like a marrow in an orchard of plums among the cut-glass distorted vowels of immediate postwar broadcasting. John Arlott, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday this week, had easily the most unconventional path to the microphone of any regular practitioner: clerk in a mental home; wartime policeman screening conscientious objectors; published poet who became a friend of Dylan Thomas and John Betjeman; literary programmes producer at the BBC in succession to George Orwell. He espoused the cause of the common man with an unabashed liberalism – twice as an aspiring Liberal MP – and after a visit to South Africa, where he answered "human" to an immigration officer who inquired as to his race, became an outspoken opponent of the apartheid regime. He was later instrumental in the "rescue" of the so‑called Cape Coloured Basil D'Oliveira, which led to a cricketing schism.

As a journalist he was most notably both the cricket and wine correspondent of the Guardian. The latter job he claimed as a right by asking "who else has got 5,000 bottles in their cellar?" And his command of the airwaves, particularly during his cricket commentary, was legendary: "His bat has as many holes in it as a Henry Moore sculpture"; "Botham runs in like a shire horse, cresting the breeze". The bon mots were prolific, and mostly spontaneous. When I congratulated him on his famous 1975 commentary at Lord's, when a streaker (Arlott called him a "freaker") vaulted the stumps before being ejected from the ground, he replied "No, I blew it. What I should have said was that perhaps his greatest disappointment was not being deprived of further cricket for the day, but that he actually managed to straddle the stumps without even dislodging a bail."

Arlott: The Authorised Biography by David Rayvern Allen is published by Aurum.

THE GUARDIAN





2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
054 My hero / Michael de Montaigne by Liyun Li
055 My hero / Michael Donaghy by Maggie O'Farrell
056 My hero / Richmal Crompton by Louise Crompton
057 My hero / Edward Thomas by David Constantine
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal
059 My hero / Sefton by Jilly Cooper

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 My hero / Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 My hero / Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson

102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill
111 My hero / Arnold Lobell by Julia Donaldson (23 December)

2012 (PAGE 9)
115 My hero / Nadime Gordimer by Tessa Hadley (27 January)

(PAGE 8)

2013

(PAGE 5)
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman (13 September)
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer (1 November)

(PAGE 4)



(PAGE 3)

2015
250 My hero John Bayley by Richard Eyre (22 January)
2016



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