Formula One: Even birthday-boy Murray Walker would struggle to bring life to this F1 fodder

You wonder how Walker’s career would have developed in this rapidly evolving multiple-choice, pay-per-view culture

What would Murray Walker make of today’s predictable grand prix racing? (GETTY IMAGES)

Murray Walker celebrated his 92nd birthday in the company of Nicholas Parsons, who was also born on the day of our Lord, 10 October 1923, and Kim Jong-un, who as Supreme Leader gloried in the chanting of his name across North Korea on Saturday on the 70th anniversary of the coming to power of the ruling Workers Party.

With astrological luck like that you might have expected Walker to coincide with other figures of global mirth this week like Sepp Blatter. He obviously did good deeds in a former life to avoid that association in the births, marriages and deaths column.

Murray is still pottering about his Hampshire homestead and would doubtless have tuned in to the race commentary yesterday at the Russian Grand Prix, probably on the BBC, given his long career spent at the corporation persuading us that Formula One was a sport worth watching.

Even the cast iron authority of Walker’s delivery, a voice that came to be the soundtrack of grand prix racing as much as the high-pitched whine of the engines, would struggle to convert today’s predictable fodder into fanfare.

Walker was, of course, a broadcaster of his time. He was given the BBC platform, first on radio and then on the new medium of television, in an era when the consumer was entirely passive in his or her viewing habits. In the pre-digital, pre-Sky age, the audience would out of necessity have to accept what was put before them. The choice was made by the broadcaster presenting material over a limited number of channels, three for the most part during my upbringing.

There we would sit as a family in a parlour constructed around the box in the corner. The experience was novel and had a radical impact on the way families spent leisure time. It also allowed broadcasters like Walker to build a relationship with viewers beyond the priesthood, drawing in neutrals who had nowhere else to go.

And so it was that we would come to cherish the avuncular inflections not only of Walker but his comrades across the sporting disciplines. Dan ‘Oh, I say’ Maskell became as much a part of Wimbledon as the men and women who lifted the trophy. Harry Carpenter was indistinguishable from a whole cluster of British boxers in the Seventies, men like Henry Cooper, Alan Minter, Charlie Magri, John Conteh and later, at the end of his career, Frank Bruno.

The late Peter O’Sullevan, David Coleman, Ron Pickering, Richie Benaud and Eddie Waring across a range of disciplines all enjoyed the same privileged exposure to an audience trapped in a beautiful window of broadcast time, enjoying the same scale of celebrity as those on whom they commentated. Formula One was late to the full live treatment, gaining extensive coverage only in the late Seventies, but even then, if dad wanted to watch the grand prix, then we would all be part of the experience. The alternative was to leave the room – and that would rarely happen.

Today, as we digest the impact of a week that has seen the sport immersed in crisis talks of one form or another, it is tempting to see the past as a perfect world of epic encounters. In Formula One, this is packaged through the deeds of great drivers, so we argue the toss about Michael Schumacher, Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost etc, erasing from the picture the crushing dominance that for long periods multiple winners enjoyed.

Walker talked us through some dog-end races long forgotten, yet it is not the mundane we recall but the flashpoint duels between Gilles Villeneuve and Rene Arnoux at the 1979 French Grand Prix; Senna and Nigel Mansell in 1991 at the Spanish Grand Prix; Schumacher and Damon Hill in Japan five years later. It was ever thus.

You wonder how Walker’s career would have developed in this rapidly evolving multiple-choice, pay-per-view culture, where the audience can follow its nose, seeking out whatever it fancies. Such was the novel nature of the listening/watching experience when Walker emerged in Fifties and Sixties Britain, the audience did not consider switching off.

It is beyond imagining these days that a live boxing encounter would attract an audience of 19 million, the record number that tuned in to watch Barry McGuigan topple Eusebio Pedroza for the WBA featherweight crown 30 years ago. Walker would have been talking routinely to millions during the Eighties and Nineties, forging close personal bonds with the likes of Mansell and Hill, to whose triumphs and failures he was indelibly linked.

It is my guess the majority of you could not identify those who called the Russian Grand Prix for Sky or the BBC, despite their competence. Sorry Crofty, Ben. Maybe it is right that the commentator retreats into the margins, leaving the show to those that matter. Funnily enough, Murray – always an accidental traveller in this celebrity world – would be an enthusiastic advocate of that.