The cricket match in Ever Decreasing Circles

You might remember Ever Decreasing Circles, a British - make that English, because it could only be English - sitcom of the early 1980s, the fading final years of a genre that quite often looked at notions of class and aspiration and then gently took the piss out of them.

Ever Decreasing Circles, like Terry and June, The Good Life, Brush Strokes, Keeping Up Appearances and several others, featured the nascent middle classes, dwellers in the cul-de-sacs of the 70s boom-burbs; commuters, middle managers, golf club members, with their dreams of conservatories and souffles and the company dinner-dance. These pretensions were easily speared, but not often as darkly as they were in Ever Decreasing Circles.

It's contextual, of course: the show is a thing of its time, written by John Esmonde not Chris Morris, but there's a quiet, unacknowledged and deep-running despair to it that in retrospect seems quite daring. Richard Briers plays Martin, a pedantic, obsessive-compulsive valve salesman with a photocopier in his garage and moral code as inflexible as a periodic table. In 2012, he would reside somewhere on the autism spectrum; back then he was just funny, and not unrepresentative. Most people knew someone like him.

His neighbours were Howard and Hilda, a couple that seem weirder now than they ever did then, a middle-aged, guileless pair who wore matching jumpers and thought the same thoughts at the same time. In 2012 they would have been hounded to death by Jeremy Kyle kids or under the care of social services. The jeopardy came from Paul, a new arrival in the close who was handsome, urbane, funny, good at everything, and - most shockingly of all - the owner of a successful hair salon. Martin loathed Paul of course, not just for who he was, but for what he represented. There was a darker subtext, too. Martin's wife obviously fancied Paul, to which Martin was oblivious (thus making any hint of betrayal all the more devastating).

Ennui, boredom, acceptance, resentment, disillusionment, loyalty - it was all there, just alluded to rather than highlighted. The other day I stumbled on an episode on Youtube (parts 1, 2 and 3). It's a about a cricket match. The set-up is classic; like all sitcoms, it telegraphs its ending while allowing it to be savoured. Martin is the team's skipper. He has run the side for 14 years, dreaming of promotion to a division where they could play a club that has 'under floor heating in the dressing rooms' (another impossibly glamorous idyll of the 1970s). He is also the fixtures secretary and the man responsible for looking after the kit, which he has just whitened and varnished.

He's desperate to stop Paul playing, of course, because he knows he'll be better than everyone else. The rest of the team all want him in, even if it means they can't play themselves. There is a tremendous little scene around this in Martin's garage, where Paul arrives to confirm his availability (he's told he'll still have to fill in and return the postcard that Martin will send to him); Here Martin recalls Denis Compton, ('I always get emotional when I think of him'), and Compton's captain at Middlesex, FG Mann, 'Not so great a player by many a long chalk,' Martin says, 'but nevertheless his captain. 'Never ever did you see Denis question FG, slight FG or demean FG.'

'What are you trying to say?' Paul asks, disingenuously.

'I'm not trying to say anything,' says Martin. 'I am saying it'.

It's kind of funny, but kind of awkward too. It has heart, and it has another twist for the '80s cricket fan in that the actor playing Paul is a dead ringer for Phil Edmonds, that most haughty of Middlesex players.

The story runs its inevitable course: Paul isn't playing until a bloke called Curly (he's bald of course, as all people in sitcoms called Curly are) is injured in the warm-up. The opposition bat first and rack up 200, partly because Martin won't bowl Paul. In reply, they're 46-7 when Martin is out in ridiculous circumstances, leaving Paul to bat with Howard, a man who, it's revealed, proposed to his wife while stoned on endorphins after making his highest ever score of 11. Paul gets the runs.

There's a sting, though, in the last scene. Martin is in the dressing room with his wife, avoiding the jollity of the bar, where Paul is holding court. The opposition skipper comes in and announces he won't be accepting Martin's offer of a jug for his lads. 'That bloke who got the runs played for Cambridge University. If you want to win that much, we won't be drinking with you'.

It could have ended there, with Martin proved right. Instead, his wife suggests they go into the bar, where Martin always plays the piano and everyone has a sing-song. Just as they go to open the door, the piano starts up. Martin's wife looks through. 'Yes,' she says, 'it is him...'

It's equivocal and bittersweet, and for the time, brilliantly done. The cricket match is equally well observed: it rings with scenes and characters familiar to any club player - bored wives on the boundary, no spikes in the pavilion, the crooked, unchallengable away umpire; even those distant and long-gone tropes the home-knitted jumper and the club kit bag. I'd say John Esmonde was a fan: alongside the Compton/Mann scene, Paul walks into bat with a Jumbo, which in the early 80s was the bat du jour. Martin makes do with a Fearnley.

The 'action' is badly filmed, another faded tradition. Cricket would appear quite often in shows like this, because it represented something, and how the characters reacted to it said something about them. No-one's used the game in this way for a long time, and it would take a good writer to make it work in these more atomised days. Writers now might be more savage, funnier, but they don't often have such lightness of touch.

Old school

There was something odd about the Sri Lanka-Bangladesh-Zimbabwe Tri-Series. Not the fact that Sri Lanka were 6-5 in the final, or that Murali (Murali!) got 33 from 16 balls to win it. It was that we didn't see it on TV in England.

It's a rare series that goes by without airtime, what with Sky trying to hold off the red-headed stepchild of 24-hour sports broadcasting, Setanta. You may have to pay, but if can, you can see pretty much everything. 

When I was a kid, you got cricket on the BBC, during the summer, sometimes interrupted by horse racing. Test matches had rest days on sunday. England's tours were available on the radio or in the paper and you'd get to see the Australians play once every four years, when they came to England. 

The BBC covered the John Player League on sundays, too, plus the Gillette Cup and the Benson and Hedges Cup. It was here that you could follow Test stars from overseas because most of them played county cricket: Richards and Garner at Somerset, Clive Lloyd and Farokh Engineer at Lancashire, Greenidge, Marshall and Barry Richards at Hampshire, Alvin Kallicharran at Warwickshire, Sarfraz at Northants, the brooding, much-feared Sylvester Clarke at Surrey, Wayne Daniel and, for one mad season, Jeff Thomson at Middlesex, and Imran Khan and Garth Le Roux taking it in turns to steam down the hill  at Hove.

The only ex-players in the commentary box were men of certain vintage; Jim Laker endured marathon spells at the mike, preserving his voice by saying something about once every three overs. The host was the genial, gaffe-prone Peter West, a BBC man down to the buttons on his blazer who got the gig after being recommended by CB Fry. 

It all has a golden haze to it, but it probably holds better in the memory than in reality. One of the BBC's tropes was to broadcast both ends from a single fixed position, so that every other over was viewed from behind the batsman, with the bowler running towards the camera.

In was from that angle that Bob Willis took 8-43 at Headingley in 1981, and Botham 5-1 a Test later. It was a good way to watch the quick men: you saw less of the batsman, but got his view of the bowler. Spinners fared less well; the last quarter of a delivery was usually obscured by the fuzz of the wicketkeeper's sweater. 

Nonetheless, you could see what the ball was doing, and got a sense of how the bowlers were feeling that you don't have quite as often now. If Sky offered the angle on red button as a kind of hip and knowing retro coverage, I'd watch it.

Mark Nicholas: Man Love

What has happened to Mark Nicholas? Louche, debonair, self-regarding: those are his strong points, or at least they were when he last departed these shores. 

Nicholas loved one man above all others, and that man was Mark Nicholas. It was the quality that gave him his edge throughout his county career, when he used it to captain, with some skill, many players who were better than he was. 

And it was a talent that transferred well to television, where his effortless charm on commentary and in post-play interviews combined the bedside manner of a particularly brilliant, somewhat haughty surgeon and a brief chat with Prince Charles. He pulled it all off with a nudge and a wink, too.

So who exactly is this bellowing, brazen groveller fighting for his life in the Channel 9 commentary box? Nicholas is now the most Australian man in there. And that takes some doing when you're sitting next to Shane Warne, Bill Lawrie and Mark Taylor. Even Tony Greig has responded by becoming South African again. 

During the Test series (which, lest we forget, involved two catastrophic defeats) Nicholas seemed to spend many hours in his green and gold reverie, watching a different game to everyone else. 'That is one of the most dramatic pull-shots you will ever see,' he yodelled as desperate, sweaty Matthew Hayden hoicked one to cow corner. 'OH NO!' he yelled, when Haydos was caught a couple of balls later.

Today, when Hussey took an (admittedly excellent) outfield catch in the Twenty20 game from his brother's bowling, he said, 'That one's Michael, the other one's David - the Husseys have just had a Melbourne moment...', a toe-curler that he followed later with: 'Gilchrist, Haddin, Ronchi.. Australia really are blessed'. 

Adam Gilchrist, if you didn't know, had been added to the C9 roster for the day. 

Well, they say the converts are always the most zealous. 

Shire horses for courses

For most of us most of the time, professional cricket is a mediated experience, ie, we're not playing or watching it live, but getting it via the radio or the box (and these days via subscription to the box, another level of mediation - if you can't afford it, sod orf...). 

While the Batsman idled away his idyllic childhood, the experience was mediated by men like John Arlott, Richie Benaud, Don Mosey, Fred Trueman, Brian Johnson, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, Jim Laker and so on. Some were former cricketers and some were not. In general, the non-cricketers described and the cricketers added expert comment. That was the point of their partnership. 

The great Arlott, a man with a poet's soul who learned his cricket at the Batsman's beloved May's Bounty, offered not just description, but a way of living. When he went to South Africa, back in the mad, bad old days, he was required to enter his race on a customs form. He wrote 'human'. He befriended everyone from Dylan Thomas to Ian Botham. He took a leather satchel to the commentary box with him and inside it were two bottles of good claret and a glass. He pressed his face into the microphone until you could hear every plosive and sibilant of a genuine Hampshire accent and said things like, 'here comes Botham, running in like a shire horse cresting the breeze'. Perfect and beautiful visions of resonance and truth.

Sky Sports would not have employed John Arlott (and Arlott, let's be honest, wouldn't have worked for them). They wouldn't have employed him because he hasn't recently captained England, and thus, apparently, can't offer the level of insight provided by, say, Nasser Hussain. 

That's not to knock Nasser, or Sky, particularly. This movement towards ex-pros only is not confined to Sky or to cricket. But it's sad that no-one is growing up hearing rich and full voices like Arlott's alongside theirs, in genuine partnership. The reason we love cricket is for the way it fits into life, not stands apart from it. It has dimensions that former England captains cannot reach. 

NB: the best (English) former pro presenter/expert/analyst are quite palpably Mark Nicholas, Sir Geoffrey and Simon Hughes, none of whom are employed by Sky. Why is that, exactly?