Test cricket made a welcome return yesterday, not that I (or my TV) knew anything about it until late last night when I came across some fuss over Ollie Robinson and him apparently doing quite well in his first match back in an England shirt for two years.
I was able to watch a bit of the New Zealand test match live during my lunch break today. There during the interval performing some analysis of the morning session was Stuart Broad, standing tall and blonde, looming large over little Mark Butcher and tiny Ian Ward.
When I see Staurt Broad I tend only to think of one thing, and it’s not his 8-15 against the Aussies in 2015.
A Question of Sport has been a staple of BBC output for many decades, but it absolutely shafted us (I say ‘us’ because I was watching it with my wife at the time) in a Mystery Guest round such a long time ago it should’ve been forgotten by now, but I’ve not forgotten it.
Obviously, many of the shots in the round were tightly cropped and taken from certain angles to protect the identity of the guest, to a particular point. We got close-ups of light ginger hair, some ginger stubble, and fair eyebrows tinged with ginger. We ran through every red-headed sportsman we knew, only for the reveal to be Stuart Broad.
Yes, that notorious red-head! (This is something we still shout at the TV whenever his face appears on screen.)
I’m not sure how the BBC managed to take someone so blonde and make him look so ginger. Perhaps, after spending a day shooting both Jonny Bairstow and Stuart Broad (because they were on a budget and were trying to kill two birds with one stone, or misrepresent two cricketers with one quiz show segment), the editing team went all Freaky Friday on us — I’m guessing accidentally, but maybe one of the team had a long-standing grievance with Stuart Broad and so the sabotage was deliberate — and transmitted the wrong bits. It’s literally the only explanation I can think of. It’s impossible for it to have happened any other way.
We must have missed the episode where close-ups of blonde hair, blonde stubble and blonde eyebrows was revealed to be Jonny Bairstow.
Unsurprisingly, neither Tuffers nor Daws (or any of their guests) guessed correctly. The punishment for this crime could only be a letter to Points of View so the BBC could smack itself on the bottom and promise not to make such a mockery of its Mystery Guests, but I never got round to writing one, presuming that someone else would.
The greatest crime in all of this, though, is the revelation that we used to watch A Question of Sport and Points of View while still in our twenties (that and Watchdog, and Homes Under the Hammer).