“What the hell do I say when I’m waiting for the bloke to walk back forty yards?”
Jane Cable spends an afternoon with Kevan James of BBC Radio Solent.

It’s lunchtime on Sunday 3rd August and all hell is breaking loose in the cricket world as England captains seem to be resigning left, right and centre. In its own small way, all hell has broken loose in the BBC Radio Solent commentary box at The Rose Bowl, because we are going on air in just a few moments, and we still don’t have team sheets or a firm start time for the match.

As Kevan James makes last minute arrangements with the studio, Raj Maru is on his mobile, scribbling players’ names onto a pad. A nasty smell of burning invades the box as Royal Marines parachute overhead onto the pitch, leaving trails of smoke behind them. Raj wrinkles his nose and jumps off his high stool to close the door, then all of a sudden Kevan’s voice changes gear and I know we are live to air. Whatever happens at The Rose Bowl during the next few hours, Radio Solent listeners and internet cricket followers will know about it.

Arriving at the ground an hour or so earlier, I’d had the chance to sit in the commentary box on the first floor of the media centre and have a chat to Kevan about how he made the transition from professional cricketer to professional broadcaster. “If I’m honest, it wasn’t planned” he told me. “During my last few years of playing for Hampshire I got to know the guys at Radio Solent, and they had this idea of me doing a piece once a week – inside the changing room, that sort of thing. So I did that for a year, and two or three years before I finished BBC South gave me a camera to film just about anything. So I’d shoot bits of stuff then I’d go back and someone who knew what they were doing would put together about a minute to go out once a month. It was good fun, but I had no plans to go on with it.

“I retired in 1999 and a friend of mine had the contract to produce a magazine on behalf of the ECB and he asked me if I’d like to edit it. When he wanted to know if I could do it, I said yes, but I didn’t have the foggiest! So I asked the BBC guys and they helped me a bit, and while I was there I got to see how they compiled sports news and that sort of thing. So over the next winter I went in on a voluntary basis to learn about the way they worked and to help them out, and doing the odd paid shift covering for holidays. That took me through to the September, when a job came up. I applied and I got it – because I knew how their system worked.

“Lots of people say to me ‘what’s the best way to get into the media?’ and I reckon the best way is to go in to learn and do it unpaid. There are so many people now who won’t do that, but it’s such a competitive world – it’s as competitive as trying to get into professional cricket. Nobody’s prepared to pay somebody with no experience; you have to give yourself an edge.”

It’s easy to suppose that Kevan’s excellent contacts with Hampshire Cricket make his job pretty straight forward; after all, he has far better access to the players and coaching staff than just about any other journalist – he’s known most of them on a personal level for years. “Sometimes it helps, definitely.” He pauses thoughtfully. “Sometimes it’s a help, and sometimes it’s a hindrance. If I had no affiliation to the club it would make it easy for me to run certain stories, because it wouldn’t matter to me at all. My bosses want me to run things that put us ahead of the game all the time and I have to think like a journalist. OK, I know some of the guys, and I hear things that I can’t put out because it wouldn’t be fair. It’s a double-edged sword. If anything I don’t run stories, and then someone else will two or three days later. There’s been a number of occasions when that’s happened and I’ve been the one who’s ended up with the story second.

“But compared to other sports, cricket’s a breath of fresh air because the access is fairly easy, as long as you don’t abuse it. With football it’s just ridiculous with the restrictions placed on you; you can only do things during press conferences when you’re there with about twenty other journalists. It’s very cold, the way it’s done, and that makes it quite dull. There’s no relationship between you and the player you’re talking to, so the interviews get more and more bland. With cricket you can still use your own initiative and that’s what makes it fun.”

Although I’d never have known it from the cool way Kevan handles all the switches and knobs in the commentary box, he confessed the technical side of the job is something of a nightmare for him. “If I was at Radio Five or any of the national stations you have guys that do all that for you – you literally turn up, switch the microphone on and you’re away. But when you’re at a local level unfortunately you have to do all the technicals yourself. I still carry around diagrams of how all this kit works, and how we rig up press conferences at various locations, in case I forget. Obviously I don’t forget the set up here, because I’m doing it so often, but things like Pompey press conferences that have to be done in a certain way. I’ve got all the schematics, the computer stuff – quite literally, button by button.”

And once the kit is all set up, then you have to talk, and talk, and talk. For the Lancashire match, Kevan and Raj were without third man Kris Temple and were faced with the prospect of commentating non-stop for forty overs. Twice. Luckily, a lot goes on on a cricket pitch, but how on earth do you describe it all, at the moment it’s happening?

“You can make more of it, or as little of it, as you want. Everybody works at a different level. Funnily enough, I was listening to the Test yesterday on my way home from Canterbury, and whatever you think of some of those guys, they are good. The art of radio is to make people feel that in their minds, they know exactly what you’re seeing. There’s commentary where you are literally just describing the action, which is fine as long as you’re doing that well. There’s other commentary when you’re actually helping the listener see what’s going on; it’s all very well just describing someone hitting the ball back to wherever, but you don’t get the tone or flavour of the game. If you’re describing the field right, they can think ‘Hampshire’s on top here, because they’ve got four slips or five slips’.

“If you get the descriptions in the right way and at the right times, it’s helping people feel as though they’re actually watching pictures as opposed to listening to the radio. I don’t know how good or bad I am at it. At it at the end of the day, you hope you’re doing a good job, but it’s just like when you’re playing – there’s always people who come up and say ‘you’re rubbish’ and equally there are people who say it’s good, and I deal with it in the same way as I did when I was playing – you take bits on board that you think are relevant and you just throw the rest of it out.

“Like any job, you should get better the more you do it. And you find ways to get yourself out of things, like if I describe a ball and then I’m thinking ‘what the hell do I say now while I’m waiting for the bloke to walk back forty yards?’ there are certain things you know you can do that will buy you a bit of time until you think of something more interesting to say. A lot of it’s the art of talking and it’s a lot easier when there’s two of you.

“There’s a bit of a problem at the moment because a lot of BBC stations are doing these internet commentaries over four days. We don’t do it, for two reasons. One is that we haven’t got the money, and the other is the quality. What we do is OK; we’ve got ex-players who by and large are pretty good on the radio and it’s believable. You need at least two voices – you need the variety otherwise it just gets dull. A lot of these internet commentaries are being done by one person; a, it kills you and b, it dilutes the quality of what you’re doing.”

I would have thought it pretty killing to commentate non-stop for over two and a half hours anyway, but that’s what Kevan and Raj do. At the end of Lancashire’s innings, they hand back to the studio and Kevan gallops down the steps in search of something to eat and drink, before they have to start all over again. A few overs in, the rain begins in earnest and the commentary stops. A nice early finish then? Not so.

It’s about an hour and a half later when the umpires finally call play off, and we troop over to the players’ dining room for the press conference. It must be the exact opposite of the football press conferences Kevan described to me earlier, as we perch on the tables and wait for Dimi to finish his shower, putting the cricketing world to rights. Tim Tremlett drops by for a while, as does Stuart Robertson. Finally Dimi appears, tape recorders are switched on, and he amiably answers questions on the aborted game and the England captaincy.

I head straight for my car, but Kevan has to cover the length of The Rose Bowl once again, this time to quite literally lock up the commentary box and turn the lights out. It’s a glamorous job, this working in the media…

Former Hampshire Cricketers - Raj Maru and Kevan James in BBC Radio Solent's Commentary Box

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