The final pit stop

It’s the end of an earache – or do I mean era? Murray Walker, the commentator once described as sounding as if his trousers were on fire, has announced that after 52 years he will be hanging up his microphone at the end of next year’s formula one motor racing season. With David Coleman stepping down after 46 years, and Peter O’Sullevan enjoying a richly deserved retirement, it really is the end for the Grandstand commentary team who came to prominence after the war as TV and sport combined to take over our lives.

Walker, who is 77, has been getting some ageist flak in the tabloids, and says he is stepping down before the punters agree with the papers. “I want to go out while I’m ahead,” he says, “because there are few things more pathetic than the chap who’s hanging on desperately when the liking for him has gone and the control he has of the subject has gone.” None of that, he hastens to add, has happened yet, but you never know what may be around the corner. Walker was an advertising executive for almost 40 years and evidently likes to play the percentages.

It is, as Walker himself points out, a journalistic cliché to trot out all the Murrayisms that have been the hallmark of his commentary over the years, but what the heck? “Do my eyes deceive me, or is Senna’s Lotus sounding rough?” “He’s obviously gone in for a wheel change. I say obviously because I can’t see it.” “With half the race gone, there is half the race still to go.” “Tambay’s hopes, which were nil before, are absolutely zero now.”

In fact, his reputation for mistakes was the making of Walker. He was always the fan who happened to have been given the keys to the commentary box: he couldn’t control his enthusiasm and that seemed naturally to lead to catastrophe. Invariably, his reference to the ease with which a driver was winning a race would immediately be followed by the car skidding off the track, hitting a hoarding and somersaulting three times before disappearing into a ditch.

These incidents were replayed lovingly every year as part of the BBC’s Sports Review of the Year, and the latter lost its most popular item when Walker followed formula one to ITV in 1996. “Unless I’m very much mistaken … I AM very much mistaken!” became Walker’s catchphrase: he might consider it a slur on his professionalism, but it made sure he was remembered. “We all make mistakes, but when I made mistakes there was no filter between me and the consumer,” says Walker.

He has always been a conscientious mugger-up of facts and statistics, making sure he was prepared for any commentary, but the root of his popularity was the unalloyed joy his sport gave him. “I stand up in the commentary box, I get very excited, I rush about pointing at the screen. Most people seem to think I have about 16 monitors giving me a total view of the course. I don’t. I have a monitor which gives me the picture that you see and everybody else sees at home.”

From 1949, when he covered his first event, until 1982, when he retired from the ad agency where he had worked for 36 years, commentary was a sideline. “It was a hobby, like collecting stamps or chasing butterflies, but in 1978 the BBC said they were going to do all the grands prix and wanted me to do them, and that’s when it started to take over.”

Walker was born into motor racing. His father, Graham, was a TT champion, and Walker junior saw his first race when he was two. “I was soaked in the sport all through my childhood, and I was either going to like it or loathe it. I liked it, but I didn’t really become enthusiastic to the point of obsession until after the war. I was in a tank regiment during the war, and started a brigade motorcycle club. When I came out I started racing, believing that I would show my father how to do it, but I very rapidly discovered that I wouldn’t.”

Failing to match his father’s achievements didn’t undermine him – he did far too well in the ad business for that – but did leave a mark. “It is difficult being the son of a famous father. You’ve always got this thing looming over you. I worshipped my father, but I remember thinking when I heard someone say, ‘That’s Graham Walker’s son’, I would like someone to point at my father and say ‘That’s Murray Walker’s father.’ I would be a lot prouder of myself if I had been world champion rather than just talking about it.”

Instead of pursuing a career on the track, however, he chose the security of an ad agency. “I was a moderately good club-standard rider, but I suppose the truth is that it didn’t matter enough to me and I chose to put my business career before trying to become a motorcycle superstar. But the enthusiasm remained and I sublimated it into talking about it.” He began commentating on motorsports, especially motorbike racing, and during the 50s the Walkers formed a father-and-son commentary team.

Walker has two voices: one for conversation, the other for commentary. The latter is more a screech and resembles a 500cc engine being revved up. “I’m very lucky because I have got a voice that suits my sport,” he says. “It’s nothing that you can train yourself to have or to be. I deal with a harsh, aggressive, noisy, fast-moving sport and I have a harsh, aggressive, noisy, fast-moving voice.”

In the early days of Grandstand, the commentary roster was fluid. Walker did a spot of rowing, but made the mistake of mocking the chaps in pink blazers (they were members of the crack Leander club). He also did some weightlifting, but eventually the motorsport took over and he became the voice of his sport. In his farewell year, he will commentate on 12 grands prix, leaving the other five open for ITV to try out possible replacements. He will be a tough act to follow.

For all the mistakes and malapropisms, there is a fund of goodwill towards him – when I met him he was signing hundreds of copies of his new book, Murray Walker’s Formula One Heroes, for an adoring National Sporting Club audience in Manchester. That adoration has managed to survive his antediluvian attitudes. He has strong views on the place of women in motorsport: they don’t have one. When I ask him how he would feel if a woman replaced him, he has a one-word answer: “Gutted.” “I’m being chauvinistic, I know that, but motor racing is a male sport. If I hear a woman talking about cricket, I feel the same way. I have got nothing against women: my wife was a woman, my mother was a woman.” This line may have been common in adman circles in about 1962.

Walker is also a chauvinist when it comes to Brits winning motor races. His three fondest memories are the races in which James Hunt, Nigel Mansell and Damon Hill took the world titles. The last of those – Damon Hill’s triumph in 1996 – was especially sweet. “I had commentated on his father, double world champion Graham Hill, who was then killed and the family fell on very hard times. Damon fought his way up from nothing. Although he has an enormous amount of talent, he succeeded because he worked on that talent rather more than others more naturally gifted had to. He won the championship at the last event, the Japanese grand prix, and when he crossed the line to win the race and the championship, the whole thing welled up inside me and I said, ‘I’ve got to stop, I’ve got a lump in my throat.’ It sounds trite now, but it was totally genuine.”

With Walker, what you see is what you get: he wears his passions – and his prejudices – on his rally jacket. He sits rather oddly with the snazzy, souped-up world of formula one, with its TV billions and corporate logos, a throwback to another age, who managed to survive all the revolutions in motor racing. He promises not to be a nuisance when he retires. “I will still go to races, but I’m not going to be a pathetic old hanger-on in the paddock saying, ‘Do you remember when Fangio won in 1951?’” Just don’t mention the motor racing-mad woman up in the ITV commentary box.

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