User:Miles offtarget/Test Match Sofa

Test Match Sofa new article content ...

Test Match Sofa is an internet broadcaster providing an alternative and sometimes irreverent ball by ball cricket commentary from a sitting room in south London. Coverage consists of all of England's international fixtures, plus whichever other matches both interest the commentators, and crucially, are able to be viewed live via satellite television within the UK.

(also known as TMS) is a British radio programme covering professional cricket, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 (long wave), Five Live Sports Extra (digital) and the internet to the United Kingdom and (where broadcasting rights permit) the rest of the world. TMS provides ball-by-ball coverage of most Test cricket, One Day International, and Twenty20 matches and tournaments involving the England cricket team.

History

BBC Radio was the first broadcaster to cover every ball of a Test match. Live cricket had been broadcast since 1927, but originally it was thought that Test match cricket was too slow for ball-by-ball commentary to work. However, Seymour de Lotbiniere ('Lobby'), who was responsible for live sports coverage and who went on to become an outstanding head of outside broadcasts at the BBC, realised that ball-by-ball commentary could make compelling radio. In the mid-1930s he got Howard Marshall to begin commentating on cricket, rather than only giving reports. From the mid-1930s to the 1950s the amount of ball-by-ball commentary gradually increased, but it was not until TMS was launched in 1957 that every ball was covered for their British audience.[1] Of those BBC commentators whose careers wholly preceded TMS, Howard Marshall is the most notable.

Robert Hudson was responsible for the launch of TMS, writing to his Outside Broadcasts boss Charles Max-Muller in 1956, proposing broadcasting full ball-by-ball coverage of Tests rather than only covering fixed periods, and suggesting using the Third Programme (as BBC Radio 3 was then known) frequency, since at that time the Third Programme only broadcast in the evening.[2]

TMS became a fixture

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/jul/31/test-match-sofa-review