Fifty Years Of Test Match Special - an interview with Peter Baxter

Peter Baxter first worked on the Test Match Special (TMS) programme in 1966, and has produced it since 1973. Peter will retire from the programme at the end of the 2007 England series against the West Indies. I interviewed Peter at the Lords Media centre and joined him in a slice of cake (a tradition now synonymous with the TMS team).

Have you seen a change in the popularity of cricket since the early days of TMS?

Cricket wasn’t that popular when I started, it was going through a bit of trough. It was the 1975 series that really got things going again. Tony Gregs England side and the fast bowlers from the West Indies rekindled public interest.
I was aware that when I was taking over I was inheriting a real institution. I had listened to it myself so I was aware of its popularity and its effect. I was doing John Arlott impersonations at the age of 10, so I was a TMS fan from an early age. It was unbelievable when I took charge. I remember Robert Hudson, who was the head of department at the time and one of the great commentators, said to me that TMS was company for people. I have often thought of that and I think it is as true now as it was then. People who listen like to feel part of the family and we like to see ourselves as a family, we probably spend more time with each other than we do with our families some times!

There are more and more issues with broadcasting rights, how do you see the future for TMS?

Well the ECB were delighted when TalkSport came on the scene recently because it meant that there was someone else bidding for the radio rights. TalkSport have been bought out by an Irish company and they are not interested in bidding again. In a funny way that did us a favour because I think the BBC realised that their involvement with cricket was under threat. They really rallied round and have been fully behind us since which has been fantastic. We had three miserable winters though; it’s very difficult to cover a series when you don’t have the rights. You are basically operating outside of the law which makes things difficult. Some countries treated us differently to others, some took the long term view that although we didn’t have the rights at that time we would in the future, so they were happy to help, others were not so agreeable. One of the South Africa series was tough and of course Sri Lanka was a bit sticky. But we are back on the straight and narrow now. I think Sky have probably taken the competition for the TV rights out of everybody’s hands but that has been beneficial for us because the ECB want TMS involved.

When you were writing the book was there anything that you had forgotten that suddenly jumped out at you?

It was a lot of fun researching the commentators that I did not work with in the early days, there are some very interesting characters there. I have been producing it for 34 of the 50 years so I have to say that there is not a lot that I don’t remember.

Is there another 50 years left in TMS?

That’s a good question, I certainly hope so. I hope that in 50 years it still sounds recognizably like Test Match Special. The game will certainly last 50 years and TMS is only as good as the game itself. Broadcasting I hope can produce the characters that are capable of doing that sort of job. You have to have people who can keep the integrity of the commentary and most importantly of all you have to have commentators who know cricket. It needs to be second nature, TMS commentators need to have the verbal ability to explain the cricket and paint the whole picture. We don’t have a high turnover of people so we introduce people into the team very gradually. Certainly there have been members of the team who has said that when they were first commentating it was very intimidating.

The recent World Cup in the Caribbean must have been an interesting competition for the TMS team.

It was a logistical nightmare. Just getting it on the air was a huge effort and I think it was about a third of the way through the tournament that we realised that it was quite dull. It was such an exciting exercise to get on the air mainly because the Caribbean is a difficult place to do a live broadcast. The trouble was that the technical systems are all different so you have that to deal with along with getting the right team to the right game. We started to realise that the World Cup was not improving and we started to ask ourselves how many good matches had we had actually seen? We decided that we had seen 3 good games; England v Sri Lanka, England v West Indies and Bangladesh v Ireland, which was a shame.

Do you think that the growing popularity of the short forms of the game will have an effect on Test Match Special?

We don’t get the same audience figure for One Day games as we do for Test matches. I like One Day games and the draw for the crowds is obvious, people can take a day off work and see a full game and a result. There are only a certain amount of things that can happen in a One Day game and we have seen most of them now. It is only very occasionally that the team batting first get the right number of runs to make an interesting and a competitive game. Test match cricket is still the pinnacle of the game.