Has Test Match Special lost its wits?

There’s a 13th man at the table at Lord’s this week as England resume the Ashes contest with Australia, which began so thrillingly at Trent Bridge, where England prevailed by 14 runs. For the first time in half a -century, -Christopher Martin-Jenkins is not present to renew one of the great rituals of the English summer.

‘CMJ’, who passed away on New Year’s Day at the less than grand age of 67, was always going to be missed and listeners to Test Match Special, the programme he adorned with his balanced commentaries, are cursing Time for being so vicious in his reaping. The graveyard, it is said, overflows with people once thought to be irreplaceable. Yet CMJ, for many years the BBC’s cricket correspondent and latterly its emeritus figure, cannot be replaced because the world of broadcasting no longer produces such men. At times it seems not even to value them.

To say that TMS, the most celebrated of all sports programmes, is not what it used to be is a commonplace. The question is: how can it live up to the standards set by men like CMJ and his predecessors John Arlott (surely the finest sports broadcaster of all) and Brian Johnston, who died in 1993? Resolving that matter goes to the heart of what the BBC is, and what it ought to be.

In tone and character TMS has always been a Radio 4 programme. Arlott was a poet, Johnston a boulevardier, CMJ a friendly housemaster, Henry Blofeld a gadfly. They all fitted in, because they knew the rules, which, as ever in England, were unwritten. Listeners understood them, too. The contract between the commentators and those who heard them has been one of the most encouraging stories in the history of our public service broadcasting.