Henry Blofeld

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2003

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the cricket commentator Henry Blofeld. Blofeld's become known as much for his musings on pigeons, planes, double decker buses, tea ladies, cakes and his catchphrase 'my dear old thing' as he is for his cricket commentary.

As a teenager he showed great promise as a cricketer and was even thought good enough to play for England until his dreams were dashed after a serious accident when his bike hit a bus. He dropped out of Cambridge and toyed with the idea of a career in merchant banking before realising his true vocation. Advised in his early years to 'paint a picture' for his listeners, 'Blowers' has since gone on to become a much-loved stalwart of the Test Match Special team.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Cricket commentary by Brian Johnston, Jonathan Agnew, John Arlott Book: A Pelican at Blandings by P G Wodehouse Luxury: Personal photo album

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a cricket commentator. He should have been playing it rather than writing
0:34.8	and talking about it, but an accident at the age of 17 stopped all that. His family found him
0:40.1	a good job in the city, but it bored him rigid, and he turned to sports reporting.
0:44.4	He's been a regular contributor to test match special on Radio 3 for more than 30 years.
0:50.0	He's written for most newspapers about the game and published more than a dozen books on the subject.
0:54.8	In all that time, he's been an itinerant freelance, lord of all he surveys,
0:59.8	a unique mixture of the well-connected and the sort of one-off that goes naturally with cricket.
1:05.2	When I think about it, he says, much of my life has been as close to the Bertie Worcester experience
1:10.5	as I can get.
1:11.5	He is Henry Blofelt, commonly known as Blowers. The Worcester
1:15.7	Experience one would define then Henry as what sort of lurching about from crisis to
1:19.6	crisis. Oh absolutely and finding crises where they don't exist too.
1:24.0	But enjoying it all hugely?
1:25.0	Oh I think so because I've always believed you've got to live in the present.
1:28.0	There's no point in looking at the past, but you've do nothing about it.
1:30.0	And you can't do much about the future either.
1:32.0	At least I've never been able to do much about the future.
1:35.0	But you know one way or another I think I've been jolly lucky, but I have had one in two crises.
1:39.0	I mean I bust an under a bus who said when I was 17 and I had a sort of heart thing a few years ago where I died
1:45.0	eight times one morning or something and one got over...
	...

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