Scoring the


ance Sieveking didn’t know what the editor was talking about. A former First World War bomber pilot, plane crash survivor, ex-prisoner of war and


now in 1925 a man looking for career advice, he was unfamiliar with the term ‘cat’s whisker’ for the primitive radio he was gazing at, which consisted of an electric coil and two glass objects resembling light bulbs. The title of the editor’s magazine was Radio Times, which was a clue, but not one Sieveking picked up. He slipped on the pair of earphones attached to the mysterious device and heard the sound of a piano. He asked if the music was coming from ‘some kind of a gramophone’. “No,” answered the editor, “it is the programme coming from the British Broadcasting Company off the Strand.” Sieveking was still puzzled: “But how does it get here” – London NW5 – “with all the windows shut?” That was how Sieveking described the unlikely start to a career, which saw him launch, among many groundbreaking programmes, the BBC’s first sporting broadcast and become one of the maestros of the new media. The editor did not sign him up but, surprisingly, sent him along for a job interview with the great Mr John (later Lord) Reith, who asked sharply: “Are you exotic?” Guessing that to be the code for ‘homosexual’, Sieveking replied, truthfully, ‘No.’ In April 1926, he was taken on by the British Broadcasting Company (soon to be rebranded as Corporation). “I had no qualifications,” he wrote in Airborne,


the autobiographical volume compiled by his son. (Paul Sieveking is the co-founder of Fortean Times and his extraordinary father, who claimed to have on two occasions extinguished a row of street lights by commanding them to turn themselves off, could have come straight out of ‘the journal of strange phenomena’.) He found this to be a stroke of luck, as he could not be pigeonholed. Whenever a task turned up that


16 | theJournalist


first try L


Jonathan Sale looks at the unlikely team behind the BBC’s inaugural sporting commentary


was above – or possibly below – the pay grade of the hard-pressed 18 other programme-makers, the solution was: “Tell Sieveking to do it.” For him, the cat’s whisker became the absolute


cat’s whiskers. He produced the first multiple- studio radio drama and the first play for the (rudimentary) television service. And when the new concept of live sporting coverage came up, “I was told to get on with it.” The broadcast on January 15 1927 of the rugby


international between England and Wales was the first in Britain about a team sport and the BBC’s first sporting commentary of any kind. (Only one sporting commentary had been broadcast, on a boxing match, which went out on Station 2LO, a forerunner of the BBC.) There was therefore no existing pool of Ian Robertsons, however shallow, from which could be fished the man behind the BBC mike. Sieveking, who did not even know the rules of


the game, discovered this when he carried out auditions. “Er, well, there’s a – I should say, there’s a – a


little boy in a yellow-and-black jersey who’s got the ball and he – no, er, he – that is, not the same boy,” was the kind of thing he heard when he asked a star rugby writer to have a go at a commentary on a schoolboy match. This journalist set the bar very low but none of the others he tried were able to get much higher. Finally Sieveking tried out a man named HBT (‘Teddy’) Wakelam, who had never written or uttered a word in public but possessed the advantage of having captained the Harlequins team of champion rugby players. And, to Sieveking’s delighted ears, the advantage of having a delivery like a manic machine gun: “Go on, boy! Pass! NOW! He’d going for the line – he’s over! It’s a try!” Sieveking now had his man. His next move


was to ring up St Dunstan’s, the home for blind ex-service personnel. Had they, he asked, a spare blind man he could borrow for Saturday afternoon? The idea was to remind the


Looking back to:


1927


HULTON ARCHIVE


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