Cricket Witness No 6 - His Captain's Hand on His Shoulder Smote

150 The Runs Don’t Count the BBC has surrendered cricket commentary rights to a commercial radio company, further evidence that cricket is no longer recognised as the province of the nation’s public provider of broadcasting services. Cricket no longer holds a place of high esteem in the public mind-set. The situation with regard to children gives rise to anxiety for the future. Recent ECB research found that children were more likely to identify the photographs of American wrestlers than cricketers while three in five children did not even rank cricket in their top ten favourite sports. This is a far cry from an age when, as this text has demonstrated, children happily welcomed cricket stories in substantial measure. Less interest in cricket, less cricket in schools, less cricket in popular culture; these separate aspects must affect each other. It is probable that the process traced in the first part of this study, whereby a high preoccupation with cricket interacted with a staggeringly popular school-based literature adorned with cricketing adventures, has gone into reverse. As with the earlier equation, this one is not open to mathematical solution. As with that same question, it is, without doubt, sensible to make a rational judgement that linkage must be present as a matter of historical course. One Victorian book on school days not previouslymentioned is F Anstey’s Vice Versa , first published in 1882. It proved popular into the modern era, with, apart from frequent re- printings, radio adaptations, plus three television and five film versions, the best of the latter possibly being the 1948 movie starring Roger Livesey and Anthony Newley. Paul Bultitude, an upstanding and self-assured businessman, finds, through the intercession of a magic stone, that he exchanges bodies but not personalities with his son, Dick. Having claimed that school days are themost joyful possible, he is alarmed to be confronted by the severe figure of Dr Grimstone as his teacher, while Dick vainly endeavours to turn his juvenile mentality to the complexities of financial life in the bustling city.