An Evening with Johnners Read Online Free PDF Page B

and commentate as the King and Queen left on a trip to Canada. They were going in a big warship called HMS Vanguard, from Portsmouth. He was told he had about a quarter of an hour, because the tugs would have to push the ship out, and he was just to describe what was going on.
    So he wrote a lot of notes, and read them all out, saying where the voyage was going, where the royal couple were to visit in Canada, the history of the ship and everything. He began to run out of things to say, so he looked around.
    ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I can see the King and Queen up there on the bridge. There they are, waving to the crowd. They won’t be back for two months. They’re saying their farewells.’ And he couldn’t think of anything else.
    ‘Oh,’ he added, ‘I see the Queen has gone below now. She’s left the bridge and she’s gone down below for some reason.’ He looked around and still couldn’t think of anything to say.
    Then, ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘I can see water coming through the side of the ship!’

    J ohn’s a marvellous chap. He’s still alive, he’s about ninety now. He was the voice of Great Britain. Every big occasion – the Allied landings, Winston Churchill’s death, the King’s death – he was always the voice they put on the air and he represented us all really.
    He was a tremendous announcer in that way, but he didn’t normally do the sports news. One day he was asked to read it and he got as far as the cricket scores, when he said, ‘Yorkshire two hundred and fifty-nine all out. Hutton ill … Oh, I’m sorry, Hutton one hundred and eleven!’

    H e joined the BBC in 1924, and those were the days when Mr Reith had just started the BBC. He became Sir John and later Lord Reith, and was a very serious minded Scotsman, highly religious and very puritan. Everything had to be above board.
    He was going round the studios one evening, when he opened the door of a drama studio and, to his horror, he saw one of the producers making love to one of the actresses on a table. He rushed back to his office, summoned his assistant and said, ‘I’ve just seen a producer making love to an actress on a table. Get rid of them both!’
    And the chap said, ‘You can’t, Mr Reith, you can’t. It’s in the Radio Times: the play’s going out next week. Think of the scandal.’
    Reith thought for a moment and said, ‘No, no, you must get rid of them both.’
    ‘But you can’t, Mr Reith. You see, she’s our best actress and he’s our best producer.’
    Reith thought for a bit more. ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘Get rid of the table!’

    T here’s a marvellous story about John Snagge. He did the Boat Race for fifty years. The Boat Race was John Snagge. I helped him for about forty years and took over from him in the last nine years, which was great fun.
    When you commentate on the Boat Race, you’re in a launch and you’re always about thirty yards behind the crews, possibly fifty sometimes, if one of them is leading by a lot. So it’s very difficult to judge exactly if they are a length up or two lengths up, or whatever it is. But John was always helped when he approached Duke’s Meadow, which is on the Middlesex side, before you get to Barnes Bridge.
    There were two flagpoles, and there was a man there who had a dark blue flag and a light blue flag, and he used to pull one up, depending on who was in the lead. If Oxford was going ahead, he’d put one flag up, or if Cambridge were drawing level he’d put two together, and so on. Because John was so far behind, he thought this chap must have a better view, sideways, than he did, so he used to watch the flags.
    ‘Yes,’ he’d say, ‘I can see the flags there on Duke’s meadow. Oxford are just going up, about a length ahead. No, I see Cambridge are coming up now.’ He used to do his commentary from those flags.
    When he retired, they had a leaving party for him and someone said, ‘That chap over there is the man who works the flags at Duke’s