ENVY IS a nasty, sordid little emotion, but I think we'd all agree that the Test Match Special team live charmed lives. Equipped only with quick minds, a way with words and a through knowledge of the game, they somehow breeze through entire summers of airtime, often talking complete bilge and never even attempting to hide that they are having a thoroughly good time. In some societies this would be enough to get you shot, but the British public respond to the team with a wild and unflinching adoration that has survived even the loss of its most beloved member, Brain'Johnston. Rare, it seems, is the sentence uttered about this national institution that doesn't include the phrase `national institution'. In other words, they get away with it, and the rest of us can only look on in dumbfounded admiration.

JONATHAN AGNEW

OVER TO YOU, AGGERS

Jonathan Agnew probably looked on in dumbfounded admiration himself once, but these days he is very much on the inside. From quiet beginnings as Johnston's straight man, he has now completed his stint as the team's Official Young Person, and could conceivably be contemplating another 40 years spend behind a TMS microphone. He has become one of the most fluent voices on the show, a natural broadcaster who appears to understand instinctively what his loyal audience requires. With Over to You, Aggers, he also shows that he understands instinctively what his publisher requires. Aimed as blatantly at the vast TMS-loving public as modesty will allow, it is everything you would expect a book called Over to You, Aggers to be.

Agnew's previous book, Eight Days a Week, was a splendidly indiscreet diary of his penultimate year as a county cricketer, writen when he thought he was about to retire and no doubt regretted when he had to go back and play another year. Since then Agnew has written for Today newspaper, become cricket correspondent of the BBC and, most prestigiously of all, joined the Editorial Board of WCM, a fact he shamefully fails to mention anywhere in the book. This second volume follows his career over these years, or, at least, uses his career as a loose structure on which to hang innumerable anecdotes.

So we join Aggers on various jaunts across the world, covering an Ashes series with the other `Beasties' from Fleet Street, wrestling with electrical equipment and alien telephone systems, watching World Cups and Friendship Tours, and narrowly escaping death in the company of fellow player-turned-writer Derek Pringle.

On more serious matters he is judicious, fair-minded and, as befits a BBC cricket correspondent, fearlessly uncontroversial. The most awkward moment in his broadcasting career – the Atherton dirt-in-pocket affair, for which he was outrageously made a scapegoat by journalists who should have known better – brings out his best and most impassioned writing. After that, though, it's back to the anecdotes. TMS fans will no doubt be delighted to learn that the famous `legover' story gets four full pages.

This is not, in all honesty, a terribly substantial book – a longish train journey should see it off – but it is an entertaining one. And after Fred Trueman, it'll be Henry Blofeld…

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