Eye screams

At Shrewsbury School a couple of weeks ago, with nice ceremony, they opened a swish new indoor cricket centre alongside what Neville Cardus once called ‘the most beautiful playing fields in England’.

At Shrewsbury School a couple of weeks ago, with nice ceremony, they opened a swish new indoor cricket centre alongside what Neville Cardus once called ‘the most beautiful playing fields in England’. All I could think of was Private Eye — for this was where the magazine’s founders learnt their cricket. I wondered what they’d have thought of four floodlit indoor nets, bowling machines, and banks of television screens to examine the crookedness of your cover-drive. Not that the Salopian four, who together left the school in 1955, were luminous players of the game, but I know they loved it: in my time, I have been captained by Richard Ingrams; been run out (twice) by Willie Rushton; I once put on a stylish five for the first wicket with Paul Foot; and I’ve lolled in a deckchair at Taunton, watching Somerset lose, alongside Chris Booker.

M’Lord Gnome himself, Peter Cook, the Eye’s moneybags, who had been bullied at Radley by Ted ‘Lord Edward’ Dexter, future England cricket captain, so distinctly preferred football (Spurs), watching televised sumo wrestling (‘Why can’t the ring be bigger, with taut ropes around it? Then we’d have fun’) and pro-celebrity golf. Re the last, in his final years Peter would bombard the BBC with requests for pro-celeb boxing: ‘You could start perhaps with Jeffrey Archer vs Michael Tyson.’

It strikes me that the prolix pomposities of modern sport as played, written about and broadcast might by now have become insufferable had not a wittily baleful Eye been casting around these past four decades in the guise of ‘Colmanballs’, ‘Pseuds Corner’, and the imperishable cast of Neasden FC. If