It's just not cricket

THE joys of English life, part 36b. Unwanted leaflets that cascade from newspaper supplements, offering "low-cost life assurance" from which you can only ever benefit by dying. Morbidly conscientious motorists who veer wildly to the left and mount the pavement whenever they so much as see an ambulance (siren on or not), thereby endangering passers-by.

Going into Dixon's and specifically asking for a VHS player in pristine condition ("it must be new, because it's a present"), then opening the box only to find a pubic hair and Marmite fingerprints all over the buttons. The phrase "it's scrap" uttered gleefully at the roadside by drivers of breakdown trucks. Dry cleaners who hand you back the clothes you'd brought in a week earlier, with the same marks on them, but now in a plastic bag and reeking of chemicals. And petrol pumps that, no matter how carefully you control the trigger, always go exactly 1p over the amount at which you were determined to stop.

But the supreme joy of English life at this time of year is surely the wall-to-wall televisual coverage of sports we're not very good at, with the plucky losers at Wimbledon closely followed by months of cricket. "Village cricket is part of the fabric of English country life," declared last night's Tales from the Pavilion (C4) with a touching disregard for reality, musing lyrically about "the scent of new-mown hay" even though modern farming has no time for such quaint bygone recreations as haymaking, preferring to ferment silage that smells like the outpourings from the bowels of a thousand anaerobic dysentery victims instead. Such anachronisms abounded throughout this brief but ill-focused look at the noble game (which looks pretty ignoble nowadays, what with all the bribes and backhanders going on), not least in its myopic view of the countryside, which writer and producer Tony Francis presumably hasn't visited for at least a decade. If he had, he'd have found that it's not so much "church bells and cucumber sandwiches" nowadays, as stench, BSE, foot and mouth, pyres of burning sheep, unemployment, alcoholism, dung, poverty, inbreeding, crime, suicide figures rocketing through the (thatched) roof, and so many vigilante farmers brandishing shotguns that you can't hear the thwack of leather against willow over the bwip-bwip of the police cars.

As They Think It's All Over has been proving for years, few sportsmen possess comic timing worthy of the name, so engaging Dermot Reeve and Jeff Thomson to perform a poor-quality, patriotic ripoff of a Smith and Jones "head-to-head" sketch was bound to end in disaster. "It's a gentleman's game .. . we like the nostalgia," declared the Englishman, to which the Aussie retorted "no wonder you guys are such good losers". Such low-octane banter ensured that even viewers whose sides split very easily could watch without risking anything more dangerous than unconsciousness.

"You Poms lack the killer instinct," continued Thomson, while Reeve lamely quipped that "we think playing is more important than winning," and as the badinage got worsinage, the whole skit seemed nothing more than a feeble attempt to explain why England is about to get stuffed yet again by Australia. But we already know why that will happen. It's because English batsmen traditionally approach the crease like Allan Lambs to the slaughter, whereas for the Aussies, the Ashes mean Waugh.

Unable to decide whether to offer us mere facetiousness or a grownup view of the game, the programme veered uneasily between idle jest and serious history. And that was a pity, because there was some remarkable footage of Laurie Lee declaiming a passage from Cider with Rosie at the Sheepscome ground (which he'd bought and donated to his beloved Gloucestershire village), and a fascinating (but far-too- short) story about 18th-century Hambledon, where noblemen staged games worth 1,000 guineas.

Either of these topics could have more than sustained an entire programme on its own.

EVEN so, I'm tired of hearing nonsense about the English cricketer's innate sense of fair play and fairness, because the game has always been highly dubious, from WG Grace regularly refusing to accept the umpire's decision, through to the sordid corruption scandals of the present day. And worse still, British sport of all kinds has been pretty consistently in the doldrums ever since Suez (apart from soccer's one final death twitch in '66), so it's no wonder we're such good losers. We've had so much practice at it.

Just as writing for tabloids is much harder than writing for broadsheets, so making tiny TV programmes is harder than making long and ponderous ones. I've often likened the best occupants of Channel 4's slot to Faberg eggs, but this was more reminiscent of a rotten egg, and the use of a Scott Joplin rag (composed in the cricket- crazed USA) was as illogical as the sepia colourising of moving footage, because neither cinematic film nor TV was ever sepia. Who this was aimed at is hard to say, because most sports aficionados would have found it far too basic, and it certainly held no allure for people like me, who prefer to keep sport at a safe distance. It's true. I even regard tiddlywinks as a dangerous contact sport, though it was once suggested to me by a sporty woman called Feltz that I might do well in field events: as a javelin catcher.

Copyright 2001
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.