At one point during his demolition of the England bowling attack on Friday, Adam Gilchrist leathered a ball delivered by Andrew Caddick with such venom you can only assume he had just caught it sleeping with his wife. Reporting on the shot, Sky's Paul Allott said: "And he's cut that between point and gully . . ."
Meanwhile, on Channel 4, Richie Benaud was commenting on the same act of brutal assault. "Ho ho," he chortled, watching the ball flash across the outfield. "My that was hit. He laid back his ears and whacked it."
The sense of communicated pleasure, the absence of cliché, the entertaining imagery - just some of the reasons why the dozen stag party members filing into Trent Bridge last week wore matching T-shirts featuring Richie Benaud's face and not the amiable Allott's.
And then there's the voice. As you make your way into a cricket ground these days, you sense Benaud all around you. Earlier this season, I was queuing for admission to the one-day international at the Oval when a man arrived at the turnstile and realised he had left his ticket in his car. As he forlornly walked back to retrieve it, another spectator turned to his friend and, in those familiar Australian tones, said: "Bit of a schoolboy error that, I thought."
Benaud has become the lingua franca of cricket. Everyone talks Benaud. It involves taking a word, working it slowly around in the little hollow formed between thrust-forward bottom lip and the front of the teeth, and simultaneously raising one eyebrow in knowing commentary. Thus when he appears for this interview, immaculately dressed, white hair at a racy length just covering the ears, and says "good morning" in that so familiar tone, it takes a monumental act of self-control not to reply in fluent Benaud.
So it seems only fair to establish the ground rules early on, and ask if he minds being so imitated. "In the late 80s, a chap in Australia called Billy Birmingham started bringing out tapes imitating me," Benaud says, establishing immediate eye contact with that same, slightly reptilian sideways glance he employs to camera. "I have various problems with what Billy does; to do with sniggering at Asian names, we could do without that. And we could do without the swearing. Rory Bremner I have no problem with, he is a satirist and a very funny one too."
So he enjoys the joke, then? "Yes," he says, doing his best to disguise a hint of weariness at the direction the questioning is taking. "The only thing that really annoys me is when all of a sudden you hear yourself on the radio advertising Smith's tyre shop or Blenkinsop's jam. They simply can't do that. And in Australia occasionally I have to take action. It happens on local radio all the time, people tell me they've heard me endorsing this or that. It is straight-out dishonest; they are saying to potential customers that I am backing their product, and that's just crooked."
You can understand why companies might try to pass off an endorsement as if from Benaud. According to his Channel 4 employers, his appeal is so enormous that more than 20,000 people have already downloaded a Virtual Richie cartoon figure from their cricket website that utters a few pieces of prize Benaud as their screen saver. Which is instructive, as the channel's remit when it took over the cricket contract last summer was to revolutionise the way the game was broadcast. And here it is, centring its coverage on a septuagenarian commentator who has been a fixture in the way the game has been reported since his debut on BBC radio in 1960.
"When BBC lost the rights, I assumed I would never broadcast on British television again," he says of his switch of channels. Which was, presumably, an alarming thought.
"I never worry about things like that, it is the way life goes," he says. "At the time, Channel 4 issued a statement that it was going to change the whole face of televised cricket, it was not going to have any grey-haired fogeys in the commentary box. Well, while David Gower can look after himself, that concentrated my mind. My wife and I had been in business for 38 years, we sat down and said: 'OK, we'll have to do a few other things.' Then suddenly an offer came in from Channel 4, and we asked them to talk to our literary agents, and when they came through with a figure we said: 'Yes, that sounds very interesting.' That was the key to it."
The money?
"No, no, no," he smiles. "The concept sounded very interesting. It was sad leaving the BBC, not quite like being divorced, but you don't leave after a period stretching from 1960 to 1999 without feeling a certain number of pangs."
Though he uses the term in a self-deprecating way, the reason why C4 could add Benaud to their roster was that, despite his advanced age, no one could remotely describe him as a fogey. He captained Australia in the 50s and early 60s, yet so rarely does he mention his own playing past, there must be a substantial proportion of his fan base who do not realise he ever even played the game. As yet, for instance, we have not heard his thought on whether Steve Waugh's Ashes-winning tourists are the finest cricket team in history.
"I steer away from comparison," he says. "I think the modern-day players are absolutely brilliant. And a lot of traditional people say to me: 'That's rubbish, these guys couldn't hold a candle to you, I remember seeing you bowl out England at Old Trafford in 1961.' I say: 'Yup, before tea time on the last day, can you remember what my bowling figures were? Well, I can tell you: I had none for 80 in the first in nings and none for 40 up to tea in the second.' The problem with relying on nostalgia for commentary is that people only remember the good things."
Benaud puts much of his technique - his economy with words, the way he resists the temptation to call the Australians "we" - down to his training. Not for him the route now favoured by commentators of using their playing careers as a shop window for a move into the media on retirement. He was a journalist by profession. In the days when cricket was no more than a paid hobby, he earned his corn working for the Sydney Sun as a police reporter.
"I did the midnight rounds for eight years," he recalls. "I worked under a fellow called Noel Bailey, he taught me something I could do now - if the phone went and someone said 'we need 300 words immediately', I could dictate it. You get this inbuilt thing ticking in your head about the number of words you're doing. Same way as now I've got an inbuilt thing about what time is left and how many words are required to fill it. In your ear you're hearing '25 to go, 20 to go, 10, 9, 8 . . .' At the same time you can hear people in the gallery shouting at each other . . . '3, 2 . . .' and you say 'good night' on one. And it's just practice, but it's got to work. Doesn't work, you go and do another job."
Has he ever made a mistake?
"Of course. I remember at Lord's once, a West Indian spectator came on the field and did some acrobatics and I said something about it, and I got a voice in my ear, it was the director. 'Lovely story, Richie, one of the best I've ever heard. It would have been awfully nice if I had a camera on it.'"
In fact, Benaud says, he still has much to understand about the medium in which he works. "The best thing I can do after a Test back home is walk up to the shops," he says. "Daph, my wife, leaves me to it and goes shopping, while I'm stopped by maybe 50 people who want to have a word. It's a rare day when I don't learn something about the production or my performance. And occasionally it is of tremendous use."
All the same, there must have been a point at which he realised he was rather a good commentator? "It's not possible to answer that except by saying I only achieve anything through hard work," he says. "But I don't want to say that because it sounds a bit pretentious. In 1956 television started in Aus, but I didn't utilise it until 1963. I watched and studied, kept looking and listening for seven years before I tried my hand at it."
Ever since, he has lived a dual-hemisphere existence, five months in Australia, five months in England, and the rest of the year in Nice. Nearly 40 years without being cold. "1962 was the last time I saw a winter," he smiles.
Does he still, though, get as excited as he did back then? "The honest answer is, I can't remember. I was very excited by the start of this series, as excited as I've been for a long time. And I'm disappointed England were not more competitive - I have never known a side so affected by injury."
How long does he feel he can continue engaging with the game?
"I'm 70 now," he says, before pausing, raising an eyebrow and pursing his lips. "I'm very much hoping to make it to 71." Economical, understated: pure, fluent Benaud.
