F1With BBC


"Some people, like me, have never actually participated at the highest level in the sport they love but Frenchman Jacques Laffite most certainly has. Against a background of 176 Grands Prix and six wins, he now commentates for French television. This is him in a Ligier at Brands Hatch but I commentated on him as recently as 2006 when he drove in the Grand Prix Masters series." (Chris Willows)


Ghastly Prospect


Roger Moody


"I worked for theBBCfrom 1970 though to 1999 and in 1978, I was asked by the Head of Sport, Jonathan Martin, to be the Assistant Producer on


Grand Prix. I thought, 'My The Passion MurrayWalker


PP: "Raymond Baxter was a consummate professional but he didn't bring any theatre to it." "Raymond Baxter was a lovely, lovely chap with a wonderful voice, a complete


command of the sport, respected and admired by everybody. I am obviously coming to a 'but' and this is it. I always felt, as part ofmyremit as a TV commentator on motor sport, a need to entertain as well as informand in my opinion Raymond Baxter informed people in an extremely authoritative way but did not entertain people - there was no passion, no excitement, no drama. That is the way he was, I amnot being unpleasant about him. "It is because I have this passion and excitement about the sport that I got this


reputation of producing what people call Murrayisms because I would be talking 15 to the dozen about the picture people were looking at and people didn't know that I didn't have 16 monitors which gave me a total command of the circuit. I had one monitor which would give me the picture that the public were looking at and it was my job to interpret the race, informthem what was happening and entertain them about what was happening by bringing out the drama and excitement. That's why the words sometimes came out in the wrong order, sometimes I made a mis- identification, sometimes I just said the wrong thing. But the difference between sitting at home dispassionately looking at a TV monitor and not having to say anything about what you are looking at, and having to stand there with adrenalin pouring out of you by the bucketful and also having to look at a telemetry monitor and interpret all the figures it is giving you and having to read the race is the difference between night and day, chalk and cheese."


God, I can't think of anything more boring than watching cars hurtling around at hundreds of miles an hour in formation'. I took that on in 1978 and went up into management in 1988. I worked on virtually all the GPs, first as Assistant Producer and then asProducer. "Murray was a wonderful man to work with. I don't really recall Murray ever losing his temper or being cross with anybody.”


"Just because you have not been World Champion does not mean to say that you are not one of the greatest ever drivers. Stirling Moss never won the World Championship and nor, here, did French-Canadian Gilles Villeneuve. But Gilles won races for Ferrari in cars that were not really good enough and to a commentator, he was manna from heaven." (Chris Willows)


88 MurrayWalker Scrapbook


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11