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Test Match Special producer Peter Baxter recalls some of the lighter moments from covering cricket in India.

It is 20 years since I first set foot in India, arriving on a hot Bombay night and feeling the intoxicating atmosphere assail every sense.

Then, I was wide-eyed with wonder, partly, I suppose, because it was my first experience of an England cricket tour anywhere.

Within a few days we were at Ahmedabad for the first one-day international.

After a recce the day before the match, I discovered one of the great truths of the great sub-continent is that time spent in reconnaissance is usually totally wasted.

The commentary box had completely changed overnight, with the addition of several hundredweight of curtaining and a scratched sheet of Perspex.

Are you receiving us?

We resolved to make the most of our airless circumstances as a small army of radio engineers started, so we believed, to get us on the air.

In fact nothing was happening at all. The match started and still we had no contact with London.

Former England captain Tony Lewis
Tony Lewis helped clear up confusion

I called out in vain on the microphone to anyone in London, Bombay or any point beyond the Ahmedabad cricket stadium and at long last heard a faint voice.

"Hello, hello," someone was pleading.

"Hello, Bombay!" I cried excitedly, "Put me through to London."

The voice persisted with its "Hello, hello" to no apparent avail.

"Come on, Bombay," I tried again; "We should be on the air by now. Please put us through."

Tony Lewis was part of our commentary team there and he now intervened to tap me on the shoulder and indicate a be-turbaned engineer sitting behind me with headphones pressed to his ears.

"Hello, hello", he was calling for the umpteenth time.

It was an early example of India's unique talent to frustrate and amuse in equal measure.

It was also an example of the perennial problems of communication, now greatly improved, but always at the least a concern.

Twenty years ago it was commonplace for a minute's telephone report to Radio 2 to be interrupted by an operator, oblivious of her sudden appearance on the BBC, enquiring aggressively, "Three minutes. You want to continue?"

The language barrier

There are misunderstandings, too, as a matter of course.

Peter Baxter has been TMS producer for 28 years
Baxter (front right) with the 1978 TMS team

Arriving in Bhubaneswar on Boxing Day 1984, mindful of a need to send a report and interview to the holiday sports programme, I went straight to the hotel telephone operator as my first port of call.

"Please can you put a call through to London for me?"

I received a reassuring shake of the head that acknowledges a request by way of response.

"You can do that now? Put the call through to London straight away?" Again the acknowledgement.

I started to write down the number only to hear the words: "Why you want laundry?" I never did speak to London that evening.

Back then, there used to be whole matches that went unreported.

Up in the northern city of Jammu in 1981 a barren press box roused the ire of the senior journalist in our party, who had been expecting telex machines on hand.

"We were promised three machines," he told the local factotum.

"There are three machines, sahib," he was told. "One telex machine in a factory eight kilometres away and two men with bicycles."

That solitary, remote telex machine did succeed in despatching one match report in the three days - the copy for the Daily Star - to a textile firm in Accrington, where it caused some surprise on the Monday morning.

Not all the frustration is of local origin.

Getting around

In 1993 I spent the entire day, from dawn until well beyond dusk, getting a commentary box sorted out to my satisfaction, standing over very willing, but sometimes uncomprehending carpenters and engineers.

I was dirty, parched and weary on my return to the hotel and headed straight for the bar to settle the dust in my throat.

An England supporter approached, leaned slightly unsteadily towards me and said: "It's all right for you. You get paid for your 'olidays."

Peter Baxter talks to journalists in Colombo
Locked out in Sri Lanka earlier this year

I suppose it is the actual travelling itself that produces the majority of the hair-raising tales.

Time spent in the opposition's half of the road, where instant death seems permanently inescapable; taxi drivers, who, on finding they have an international cricketer on board, spend more time looking at him than the way ahead; flights for which the advertised departure time is only ever an opening of negotiations; a celebrated 10-hour bus ride through the night from Calcutta to Jamshedpur, interrupted by bandits, who were told to scram and surprisingly did so, and a stop at a roadside cafe where the residents viewed the British press as if they were aliens from another planet.

But everywhere there is a welcome.

Not, perhaps, always as impressive as in Indore, where the All India Radio station staff had been lined up for inspection when I arrived to deliver a match report to the BBC.

I was granted the use of the best studio - the Music Studio.

It turned out to be a well carpeted room with a solitary microphone on an eighteen-inch high stand in the middle of the floor - and no other furniture.

Seated cross-legged at it, instead of strumming a sitar, I spoke prosaically of Ian Botham.

Test Match Special will be providing full coverage of England's Test series in India on Radio 4 198 LW.