They Don’t Like Cricket…

I chanced across a much earlier TMS pop moment on the radio yesterday – a fragment of a David Essex interview (from 1989, I think). Johnners asks DE to sing a song from Evita (I think it’s Oh What A Circus) and then Johnners joins in doing trumpet noises. I’m fairly sure none of the current crew would attempt such a feat, and that’s surely a good thing.

A brief change of sport, if you’ll allow me. To Kiev, where Radio 5 Live’s crew – Kelly Cates, Mark ‘Lawro’ Lawrenson, Chris ‘The Waddler’ Waddle*, Alan Green and John Murray – were being collectively baffled by Dua Lipa’s performance before the Champions League final. One of them (Murray?) spelled out her name for the others – and got it wrong (an extra ‘p’). Lawro wondered what had happened to the promised Sean Paul, and was informed he had been on stage. Green was stereotypically apoplectic. Cates – ‘I’m as much of a Dua Lipa fan as the next person’ – was the only one who had a clue, despite protesting that she too is old.

(I mean, I agree with them that random pop star isn’t a particularly useful warm-up for a football match).

*Briefly a pop star himself, of course.

Today’s lunchtime guest on TMS was Lily’s dad Keith, introduced by a blast of Vindaloo. Turns out that as well as his more famous interventions in pop, Keith was a member of Rough Trade’s cricket team, the Old Roughians. The only other performer I can find mention of having played for them was the Go-Betweens’ Grant McLennan, although Joe Strummer was apparently their biggest fan.

Anyway, the interview was conducted by Dan Norcross, who very familiar with Allen’s varied career. And reading Pete’s original post and the comments that have followed over the years, it’s clear something has changed. Because 12 years ago, TMS and pop did indeed seem an odd mix. This absolutely was not a generation gap thing – Christopher Martin-Jenkins was younger than Mick Jagger, and Jonathan Agnew was born a couple of years after Madonna – but one of culture.
Nor was it universal then – as we’ve learnt, Boycott, the oldest current regular, is a proud (real) pop fan, and Mike Selvey was a classic ’70s figure (he describes himself as ‘guitar hero’ in his Twitter biog). But now Aggers really does seem to stand alone in the TMS world in his lack of pop cultural fluency (or maybe he’s just bypassed the pop era and gone straight to the social media one) – there’s no such clueless avuncularity to be had from Tuffers, let alone Isa Guha or Graeme Swann or, alas, Michael Vaughan.