An Evening with Johnners Read Online Free PDF Page A

producer said, ‘Right, go out under an umbrella and interview the Indian manager. We’ll try and fill in some time.’
    The Indian manager was a little man called Mr Gupta, a bit of a volatile chap. I don’t know how much English he understood. Anyhow, I got him under the umbrella and said, ‘Mr Gupta, have you got a good team?’
    ‘Oh yes, we’ve got a very good team.’
    ‘Really,’ I said. ‘Any good batsmen?’
    ‘Seven very good batsmen.’
    ‘What about the bowlers?’
    ‘Six very good bowlers.’
    I thought this was getting a bit boring and I’d better try another tack, so I said, ‘What about yourself. Are you a selector?’
    ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I’m a Christian!’
    So I pretended not to laugh and said, ‘So, tell me about your wicket-keeper …’

    B ut I was meant to laugh on the occasion when I interviewed Uffa Fox at the Boat Show. Do you remember Uffa Fox? He was the great yachtsman who taught Prince Philip how to sail, a great old sea salt. Sometime before, he’d married a French lady. Nothing very odd about that, except that she couldn’t speak a word of English and he couldn’t speak a word of French.
    So when I was interviewing him at the Boat Show I said, ‘Before we talk about the boats, excuse me asking a rather personal question. You married this lady, who doesn’t speak your language and you don’t speak hers. How does a marriage like that work?’
    ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s quite easy, my dear chap. There are only three things in life worth doing. Eating, drinking and making love – and if you talk during any of them, you are wasting your time!’
    A lovely bit of philosophy, isn’t it?

    N ow things often go wrong. Sometimes you know they do, sometimes you don’t. I’ll give you two instances which luckily you didn’t know about.
    In the late forties and fifties we used to go live in the evenings at about eleven o’clock at night to a wood at Hever Castle in Kent. We used to broadcast the birds singing. If it wasn’t raining, the nightingales would sing and so would the other birds.
    I used to do this with Henry Douglas-Home, Lord Home’s younger brother, who was known as ‘The Bird Man’. We would run microphone leads from a van to various parts of the wood and one night at about ten o’clock (remember we were on live at eleven o’clock) he said, ‘We’ve just got time to check the microphones.’
    So he asked the engineer, ‘Will you bring up the one by the bluebell glade,’ and the engineer turned it up and there was a willow warbler, or some other bird.
    ‘Right,’ he said, ‘that’s working. Now, the one by the little bridge by the stream,’ and he brought that up and there was a wood pigeon. Then he tried the one by the fir tree and there was a cock pheasant.
    Finally he said, ‘We’ve just got time. Let’s check up on the one over the rhododendron bush, where we’ve got the nightingale.’
    The engineer brought the microphone up and we heard a girl’s voice say, ‘If you do that again, Bert, I’ll give you a slap in the kisser!’
    He just had time to run round and say, ‘Please come out.’ And a very disgruntled couple came out, doing various things up and saying, ‘You might have let us make love in peace.’
    He pointed out that in about five minutes time we’d have said, ‘Let’s hear the dulcet tones of the nightingale,’ and goodness knows how far they’d have got by then!

    T here was another occasion when it was lucky we weren’t on the air. I used to do these things in In Town Tonight for about three or four minutes each week where I’d do something live and exciting. One of the things wethought we’d do was see what it was like lying under a train. We found out from Southern Region that, if ever you go into Victoria, about a mile outside the station there are some planks between the lines. If you take up the planks, there’s a well about three feet deep where the workmen can crouch.

    They said I could go in there