It's NOT cricket, or is it? - Today's Close Call
Post categories: You & Yours Presenters
|11:38 AM, Tuesday, 31 August 2010
We came close to asking you what the topic should be for today's 'Call You & Yours'. We found ourselves on the horns of a dilemma because of the events of the last forty-eight hours in the world of cricket. Should we put 'on hold' our plan to debate the apparent shortcomings that exist in this country when it comes to learning foreign languages, and discuss fair play in sport instead?
After all, Radio 4 LW is the home of 'Test Match Special' so it's fair to assume a significant proportion of our listeners are cricket enthusiasts and it was also possible to take the debate beyond cricket by citing the recent 'bloodgate' affair in rugby union. But we didn't, and here's why.
In our minds a successful 'Call You & Yours' is as much about experience on the part of the callers as it is about opinion. We can all think of phone-in programmes where the listening experience is made up of a series of incredulous glances towards the radio and cries of "yes, but how do you know?". I'm not saying there's anything wrong with those programmes, but we're after a little more light and a little less heat.
So against that backdrop our fear was that a cricket-related phone-in would provoke frustration and outrage, certainly, but not quite so much insight. And if people did come on the air volunteering an experience of being encouraged to cheat at sport, we were clearly venturing into difficult legal territory if any names were mentioned. "I remember Mr Jones at our sports club promising us a fiver if we conceded a last minute equaliser" would be an interesting addition to the debate, but I don't suppose it would go down very well with Mr Jones. Especially if he didn't do it. In which case it wouldn't go down very well with the BBC lawyers either.
So we stuck with our original plan, a plan which was generating a lot of correspondence the moment Peter mentioned it on last Friday's programme. By all means tell us if you think we made the right decision. And who knows...maybe we'll put it to the vote in the future.
Julian Worricker presents You and Yours on BBC Radio 4
Comment number 1.
At 14:26 9th Sep 2010, Jeremy Stersky wrote:I saw the cricket headlines here and I got excited! But I see that not much in the article about the game of cricket. But I saw the reference to the 'bloodgate' affair in the rugby union and I’m quite familiar with that. The incident perpetrated by Dr Chapman smacks of the highest levels of ethical misconduct. It really saddens me to think that there is so much scandal – with Pakistan and the Lord’s Test and now this bloodgate affair too. Hopefully we’ll return to some sense of normalcy soon.
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Comment number 2.
At 15:14 6th Dec 2010, U14714220 wrote:Cool, I liked it! ;) Here we are Russian! Unfortunately I did not have big problems with English.
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At 15:26 10th Dec 2010, U14717142 wrote:All this user's posts have been removed.Why?
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At 11:04 29th Jan 2011, U14767691 wrote:This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.
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