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Production: An Audience With Henry Blofeld
Dates:
no dates available
Celebs:
Henry Blofeld
Description: BLOWERS CAUGHT SHORT AND GRUMPY/DECANTED AND DISTILLED
Blowers starts the first act with a good old grumble about old age which leads onto his four recent hip operations.
Then the current scandals are given a good going over. At the time of writing Tiger Woods, John Terry and Ashley and Cheryl Cole get it in the neck.‘Elf & Safety are put firmly in their place as are the community snoopers that spy and sneak on all we do. The MPs get a real roasting over their expenses.
Cricket has its moments too. Ian Botham had an affair, Mike Gatting, another England captain fell for a redtop. The meretricious merits of Twenty/20 are up for discussion. So are those who run English cricket and who jumped into bed with Sir Allen Stanford.
Blowers then talks kindly and humorously about the Test Match Special commentary box when he brings alive some of the great commentators like Brian Johnston, John Arlott and Jim Swanton. He tells why cakes became such an important part of TMS.
The first half ends with wine stories involving John Arlott and wine waiters before ending with an hysterical story about a night in a barn on the Pennines.
The second act he returns briefly and amusingly to old age, then boarding school at the age of seven and a half and how he fell in love with cricket. He talks a little bit about his own chequered career. Two hundreds made at Lord’s where he was also once the third victim of a hat trick. He spent 28 days unconscious after a collision with a bus at Eton and went up to Cambridge from where he was sent down after two years having gained the worst cricket Blue since Crimean War. He played in first class matches against both Keith Miller and Denis Compton.
He tells of the amazing luck he had getting into first cricket writing and then cricket broadcasting.
Fifteen minutes about his namesake Ernst Stavros Blofeld who was one of Ian Fleming’s baddies in the Bond books. He got to know Ian in his club and then on his first honeymoon, in Jamaica, had lunch with him at his house in Oracabessa where he met Noel Coward. He then tells two stories about another friend, Clive Dunn, aka Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army.
The audience will have been asked to write down questions they would like him to answer and before ending the show with an hysterical story about his family doctor in Norfolk
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