Henry Blofeld, who has retired from Test Match Special after more than forty years in the job, was the subject earlier on this week of a withering assessment by Jonathan Liew in the Torygraph. Blofeld, says Liew, was the beneficiary of privilege. After Eton and a tedious spell in the City, the broadcaster (a promising cricketer until his bike collided with a bus) fell into the BBC via a stint in county cricket reporting arranged by a personal contact.
Liew is not very forgiving of Blofeld's faults. He points out that Blofeld wasn't a terribly good commentator (which is true, particularly in later years), being ill-prepared, prone to embarrassing gaffes and with a tendency to lean too heavily on his trademark observations about pigeons, buses, planes and (in the years before new stands obscured Old Trafford's railway station) trains.
Liew is shrewd enough to have worked out that to some extent Blofeld's upper-class twit persona is a front (and certainly no one watching Blofeld's final stint on TMS, broadcast live on Twitter, could have been in any doubt that here was a vastly experienced professional giving the occasion 100% of his attention), but he nevertheless makes the point that Blofeld got the job without by any stretch of the imagination being the best person to do it. This does, Liew says, tell us something about the extent of our meritocracy.
I think Liew is only partly right. It's certainly true that Blofeld got the job in the early 70s because of his connections, but times have changed. Whereas in the old days personal contacts might have got you into Oxford (as Polly "One O Level" Toynbee might attest), into medical school or into a pupillage in Uncle Christopher's chambers, nowadays attempts to use such connections would be more likely to be greeted with embarrassment than with understanding. Moreover, Blofeld may not have been the best cricket commentator but he was often an entertaining one, and the love which his colleagues and listeners evidently felt for him helped foster the sensation that one was eavesdropping on a friendly, slightly dissolute bunch of spectators who'd had a glass of wine before lunch high up in the stands.
More seriously, the kind of patronage Liew identifies is not only dead but has been replaced by another - tokenism. Are Alison Mitchell and Ebony Rainford-Brent really the best people to do the TMS job? I doubt it. They were given the chance because they were a woman and - Holy Grail! - a black woman respectively.
I've mentioned before Robin Day's controversial assertion that Anna Ford only got her job on TV because men wanted to sleep with her. Day was pilloried, but he was right. He wasn't suggesting that Ford couldn't do her job well enough (nor am I suggesting Mitchell and Rainford-Brent can't do theirs). He was suggesting that someone else might have done it better. Very much like Henry Blofeld in fact.
But ironically, whereas Blofeld was an entertaining gasbag, Mitchell and Rainford-Brent are competent broadcasters at best. TMS now has quite a lot of these. People like Blofeld don't grow on trees.
