There is no doubt that by the time he decided to quit in 1980 he had fallen out of love with some aspects of the modern game. He never rammed the old days down your throat, but, although he understood the players’ perspective over the Packer affair that split the game, he longed for gentler, less materialistic times. He loved the way I approached cricket, for instance, which was to try to win, while having fun as well, and he feared that as time progressed the fun simply would not survive.
He took his leave from his devoted listeners in typically undemonstrative fashion. Declining the offer from Test Match Special producer, Peter Baxter, to do the final stint of the Centenary Test between England and Australia at Lord’s in 1980, he stuck to the rota he had adhered to for donkey’s years and finished with: ‘… and after a few words from Trevor Bailey, it will be Christopher Martin-Jenkins.’ And when the man on the public-address system announced to the crowd that John had made his final broadcast for Test Match Special, he missed the applause led by the players on the field because he was at the back of the commentary box being interviewed for the PM programme.
After I bought a place on his home Channel Island of Alderney, our chats were just as regular and, health permitting, sometimes just as animated.
‘Come to the house, Ian,’ he would telephone me, ‘and bring your thirst with you.’ We often disagreed violently on various issues – his politics were as far removed from mine as it is possible to be – but however harrowing the experience was of seeing him fighting to get his words out, they were always, always worth the wait.
It was during one of these conversations, many years later, that John told me the biggest regret of his career was that, by retiring when he did he missed the chance to describe the events of the 1981 Ashes series, Headingley and all. Come to think of it, that is probably one of the biggest regrets of my career too.
There is, of course, a perfectly innocent explanation for the moment I was stopped by police on Wimbledon Common with a six-foot blow-up doll of Mr Blobby and the star of soft-porn movie classic Confessions of a Window Cleaner.
I’d been invited by actor and bon viveur Robin Askwith to appear in pantomime with him during one of those winters when that other seasonal cabaret, the England cricket team, had set off on tour without me. ‘Squiffy’ – as he is known to his mates – has been a good friend for many years.
On the 1990–91 Ashes tour of Australia, when David Gower and John Morris were fined by the England management for hiring a Tiger Moth and ‘buzzing’ the Carrara Oval, it was Squiffy who responded by chartering a plane that flew over the Adelaide Oval during the fourth Test a few days later, trailing a banner which read ‘Gower and Morris are innocent.’ Gower thought the stunt was hilarious; needless to say, tour manager Peter Lush was less amused.
Anyway, during this 10-week stint treading the boards at Wimbledon, I decided a life-size inflatable of Mr Blobby – a character enjoying popular appeal on a madcap Noel Edmonds TV show – would make a perfect Christmas present for my youngest daughter, Becky. After the performance one night, Squiffy and I took the short-cut back across Wimbledon Common as usual to our hotel at 1 am … with this conspicuous, pink-and-yellow latex lunatic for company. Some of the looks we got from late-night revellers swaying home from the pub were priceless – and then came a flashing blue light.
I can’t remember exactly how the conversation went, but once the police had established there was nothing sinister about our behaviour, they released all three of us – Squiffy, Botham and Blobby – without a caution and they accepted that the blow-up doll was all part of the pantomime buffoonery. Back at the hotel, Mr Blobby took up residence in the doorway between our adjoining rooms and he scared the life out of one night porter who brought us sandwiches on room service, only to find this rubbery monster answering the door. Becky? She loved her Christmas present. She thought it was mind-blowing.
Panto with Squiffy was always a lark. He’s one of the funniest men I’ve ever met – a natural comedian. But he is also one of the vainest. Every morning, from the room next door, I would hear him asking, ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall – who is the fairest of them all?’ And after a couple of strokes of the comb, the same voice would reply, ‘Why, Squiffy, of course!’ He was also paranoid about catching colds or the ‘flu, in case his speaking voice disintegrated into a croak, and he did more for the sales of Lemsip and Sudafed than anyone I’ve ever known. Just one sniffle, or one cough, and Robin was convinced he had contracted some weird, incurable disease.
For all the sachets in his medicine cabinet, however, Squiffy is a talented guy and great company, serious enough about his work to be a thorough professional, but also modest enough to laugh at himself. He is probably best-known for those Confessions films. One night, after appearing together in Dick Whittington at the Theatre Royal in Bath, we returned to our hotel, turned on the TV and there he was, helping a young lady out of her clothes in a re-run of Confessions of a Window Cleaner.
Keen student of the acting business that I am, I was only too glad to watch the master at work on the small screen – to see if I could pick up any tips for my own dramatic presence in pantomime, of course. But those films have aged so quickly, and the music sounds so tinny, that they just appear barmy now: within 10 minutes, Squiffy and I were laughing so much we could barely breathe.
Living these days on the tiny Mediterranean island of Gozo, next door to Malta, Squiffy has a private yacht which is his pride and joy. Whether I would set sail with him further than crossing the Serpentine in Hyde Park is another matter!
I’ve never met a man who cared less about his public image than Mike Atherton. Some cricketers can never get enough of being in the spotlight; whether it be in print, on radio or television, beaming out from advertising hoardings or at the front of the players’ balcony whenever the champagne corks are popping. Others even love the glare of notoriety. Mike always gave the impression he would rather have his teeth pulled out with rusty pliers as his extraordinarily low-key farewell to English cricket at the end of the 2001 Ashes series underlined.
Athers made an art form of being his own man. From the moment he took over the captaincy of England from Graham Gooch halfway through the 1993 Ashes series, to the emotional farewell to his defeated troops at the end of the 1997–98 series against West Indies in the dressing room at St John’s in Antigua, the main feature of his leadership was that, in pursuit of his ambition to succeed, he didn’t give a monkey’s who he upset. When he gave the order that wives and girlfriends were not welcome on the England tour to Zimbabwe and New Zealand in 1996–97, his action proved conclusively that, if and when he felt it necessary, this approach even extended to his team-mates. I didn’t agree with his decision to declare with Graeme Hick on 98 not out on the Ashes tour of 1994–95, but I admire his courage in making it.
As a senior player when Athers made his first steps in 1989, I couldn’t help feeling that he didn’t want us around much longer, and later, reading between the lines of his first utterances as skipper before he picked the squad for the following winter tour to West Indies, the message was clear: ‘Bog off, you old gits.’ I had retired by then, so that didn’t matter to me personally. But I do remember thinking such an attitude was either extraordinarily brave or extraordinarily naïve.
Regarding that tour to the Caribbean, although Gooch had decided to make himself unavailable, at