Someone Who Was

Relections on a life of happiness and fun


Brian Johnston has over the years become synonymous with the great English game of cricket. Indeed he is known as the `voice of cricket' following more than twenty years as a regular member of the commentary team for Test Match Special. However, his professional life has not been limited to cricket alone. As a broadcaster and presenter he has been involved in many popular radio programmes such as In Town Tonight, 733 episodes of Down Your Way, Let's Go Somewhere, as a member of the television commentary team on many major state occasions and for 42 years as part of the team commentating on the Boat Race.


On this tape he gives us an A - Z account of his autobiography told in the inimitable Johnners' style with the accent heavily on humour, but also covering his experiences with the Grenadier Guards during the war and the more poignant aspects of his family life. He is joined on the tape for a few minutes by noted actor Martin Jarvis, who plays the straight man in a hilarious re-creation of his 100th broadcast of In Town Tonight in 1950 which featured a stand-up comedy routine with all those wonderful corny old jokes which inevitably started with `I say I say...' Finally, we finish with the original BBC recording of Johnners' now famous cricket broadcast when he had an uncontrollable and extremely infectious giggling fit over Jonathan Agnew's description of the way Ian Botham had been out, before slowly regaining command of the situation.