As we made our way to the cars afterwards, I thanked Sid and said, ‘That’s a great motor. It’s even better than Graham Gooch’s and he was captain of England. It must be worth at least fifty grand.’
‘Fifty-five, lad, and paid for by doing stuff like this. You did well tonight. You can do this. You need to sharpen up a bit but that will come with experience. I’ll see you around.’
Over the years, I’ve worked with a lot of fine comedians, people like Mike Farrell, Adger Brown, Jed Stone and Ian Richards, who can be guaranteed to put on a good show at any dinner. But Sid Dennis remains my favourite, partly because he’s hilarious but mainly because of his generosity that night.
As I’ll relate later, not all my gigs have gone as well as that one, but I managed to build up a decent reputation as a speaker who was not only entertaining but could also be relied on to turn up and not drop organisers in the shit at the last minute. However, as lucrative as the circuit can be, it wasn’t going to be enough to pay all the bills and provide the funds to get the company up and running. I needed something else.
As well as cricket interviews on Sky, the BBC and Channel 4, I’d appeared on a number of TV shows as varied as A Question of Sport, kids’ Saturday-morning programmes and the groundbreaking TFI Friday with Chris Evans and Will Macdonald, which was the only show where it seemed compulsory to down several pints before going on air. I’ve had a few nights on the lash with Chris and Will, including one where Chris tried to match Alan Brazil drink for drink and only realised he’d failed when he fell down the stairs while Alan strolled down nonchalantly. Chris is a terrific guy and for me one of the best broadcasters this country has produced in recent years. His radio work inspired me to get into it. Will is a brilliant producer and a keen cricket enthusiast like Chris, and is someone you can always rely on. A good mate.
Radio is my favourite medium. It is much more relaxed and spontaneous, more intimate. There’s not the clutter of cameras and lights that inevitably make TV more formal. There’s nothing between you and the listener but the microphone which allows you to chat to them in their homes, in their cars or on the beach. I’d always made myself available for interviews as a player and was happy for 5 live or talkSPORT to ring me up for a quick word and never dreamed of asking for payment. My first solo broadcast came when Kevin and Vicky Stewart, the owners of the Chelmsford-based station Dream FM, invited me to present the drive-time show every Friday night during the winter on the recommendation of my car sponsor Mike Lumsden of Mercedes Benz Direct. They really took a punt on my popularity as Essex captain and gave me loads of good advice, not least just to be myself and talk to the audience as though I was talking to a couple of people in a bar. I played some of my favourite music, chatted about sport and conducted my first interviews, many of them with mates like Jamie Redknapp, Jamie Theakston and Graham Gooch. Phil Tufnell even came into the studio for a chat and a laugh. It all seemed to go well and planted the seed that it might be something I could try when cricket was over.
Although cricket was my chosen profession, I’d had a passion for all sports since I was a kid. I grew up in a house in Bolton where the talk rarely moved off Manchester United in the winter and local cricket in the summer, with plenty to discuss about athletics, tennis, rugby league, horse racing or anything else that happened to be on the television in between. I even had a couple of snooker lessons with local legend Tony Knowles. So, while it may sound corny for me to say this in view of my present employment, talkSPORT really was my favourite radio station. I used to have it on in the car as I drove to and from training or matches and loved its mix of informed comment, banter and irreverence. They realised I was always happy to go into their studios and I was interviewed on the afternoon show by Paul Hawksbee and Andy Jacobs, and on Rhodri Williams’s Sunday show. After one visit, Andy Townsend said, ‘You want to keep in here. You never know – when you’ve finished playing, it might be something you could do.’
I must have done something right because, when Paul Hawksbee went on holiday one year, I was invited to sit in with Andy Jacobs. I said yes straight away and hastily rearranged my other commitments to leave my afternoons free. After a couple of training days with Matt Smith and a chat with Andy, I found myself on air as a co-host on one of the most popular shows in speech radio. Looking back, I know I wasn’t that good but it was great experience and Andy was terrific, jumping in to rescue me whenever I started to struggle. My admiration for professional broadcasters went up enormously. It had never occurred to me that something as apparently simple as reading out an email or just holding a conversation with someone across the desk could be quite tricky in practice. You had to make it sound like you were chatting normally but without all the cutting across each other and half-finished sentences that you get among friends in a pub. Suddenly I realised that making it sound natural was harder than I’d thought.
For all the awkwardness I felt at times, I still enjoyed doing the show and the management clearly thought I had some potential because they asked if I would continue to do regular sessions. I was tempted but had to turn them down because it would have interfered with my cricket. But I kept in touch and, by great good fortune, when I was forced to hang up my cap, a vacancy came up to work as a pundit on their cricket coverage. Shortly after that, they offered me a regular spot alongside Alan Brazil on the breakfast show. It meant getting up at 3.30am, six days a week but I didn’t think twice.
Working with Alan turned out to be a fabulous experience. He knows what it’s like to make the transition from sport to radio and he helped me avoid many of the traps that lurk around the corner in live broadcasting. I was his first ‘rookie’ co-host but he was patient, generous and incredibly supportive.
Al may come across as a feisty Scot who just talks off the top of his head but everything he says is based on a profound knowledge and love of all sport and his exceptional ability as a communicator. There’s hardly any subject that he isn’t well informed about. I smile every time he comes out with ‘As you realise, I know nothing about cricket’ because I know he’s just about to utter a gem that cuts right to the heart of whatever we are discussing.
To say that Al likes a drink is like saying Ian Botham relished beating the Australians. He once said to me, ‘Ronnie, remember the glass is always half full,’ but I don’t think he could possibly know that because I’ve never seen him drink a half. There have been mornings, and remember I get to the studio along with the milkman at about a quarter to five – Al comes in about five to … well, let’s leave it at five to – when I could swear he has come straight from whichever bar he was regaling with his stories. Yet he is still switched on to the latest news and ready to ask all the right questions of the guests. Once that studio light goes on to indicate we are live, he is the consummate professional. He was a hell of a striker in his day, especially in his time at Ipswich, but I would venture to suggest that he is an even better broadcaster.
He has a wicked sense of humour and loves to take the mickey out of me. It was Al who gave me the nickname Vernon because he said I sound like Vernon Kay, who was also born in Bolton. He never misses the chance to tease me about my busted relationship with Nasser Hussain, or try to put me on the spot about some other member of the cricket fraternity that he knows I’ve fallen out with just as I’m bending over backwards to be fair to them.
Mind you, I’m not the only one who has to field his spiky probes. I remember England manager Duncan Fletcher coming into the studio to plug his autobiography and, after the usual pleasantries and some questions about the book, Alan said, ‘Duncan, something I’ve always wanted to ask you. Why didn’t you pick Ronnie more often?’
To his credit, Duncan didn’t blink and assured Al that I had been close on a lot of occasions. Close but no cigar.
One of my favourite moments with Alan came during the sparring that goes on between him and Mike Parry just before the handover at ten o’clock. All through our programme that day we’d been playing snatches of our favourite music from films and Alan had been threatening the audience with what he claimed was my number-one choice, which he