BBC launches cricket comedy. Don’t all rush

Greetings, readers.

This just in from the BBC. 

“Yes, It’s The Ashes provides a comic angle on the [Ashes] series as it unfolds every Saturday morning from 4 July (11am-12pm) 

“Andy Zaltzman, comedian and certifiable lifelong cricket nut (diagnosed as being unhealthily obsessed by cricket shortly after birth), will be assisted/goaded in finding comedic insight and absurdity in the great game’s greatest rivalry by a team of similarly cricket-mad guests.

“Zaltzman commented:  “I can’t think of a better time to be doing a series about the 2009 Ashes than in July and August 2009.  Nor a better place to be doing it that 5 Live.  The show will be packed with jokes and cover every conceivable angle of England’s attempt to regain the urn which they so unluckily lost 5-0 in 2006-07.  I guarantee there will never have been a 2009 Ashes show like it.”

Boy, it certainly sounds madcap, eh, readers?

Possibly the only mildly positive thing I can find to say about this is that my monthly struggle to find something to ridicule on my back page in SPIN will not be quite such a struggle this summer.

Certifiable lifelong cricket nut!

Diagnosed as being unhealthily obsessed by cricket shortly after birth!

Cricket-mad!

Oh, stop it, Zaltzman.

No, really. Stop it. You’re depressing me.

I’ve been following Zaltsman’s largely mirthless columns on cricinfo for some time, baffled by the hysteria he seems to excite in Indian readers. 

There’s just something about people wanting to ‘jazz’ ‘up’ cricket that gets my blood up. The thing that I most despise – and prepare for plenty of it this summer – is people whose knowledge of being a ‘cricket’ ‘nut’ runs to Headingley 81 and Edgbaston 05 but who somehow manage to write hopeless ‘sideways-look’ style pieces in the national papers during the Ashes.

Of course this is partly professional jealousy. I write hopeless sideways-look pieces on cricket all year round. Why should they get all the glory?

I expect he’ll be marvellous.

You?