Paul Weaver motor racing The television commentator best known as Muddly Talker is currently the subject of national debate in England. It is being suggested that at the age of 77 Murray Walker is well past his pitstop date. I could not disagree more strongly. Walker+s age is irrelevant. His is the most recognisable voice in motor sport but he needed to be flagged in for a tongue change yonks ago. He was always accident-prone. To start calling for his head now is nothing more than ageism. In the black-and-white, tiny-telly, Clark- Hill-Stewart-Surtees Sixties he had me falling out of my high chair with his faux pas, so it is hardly surprising, two generations later, that he has not got any better.
Formula One, in team terms, is only a two- horse race. But Walker still has trouble distinguishing between Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello. -Rally points scoring is 20 for the fastest, 18 for the second fastest, right down to six points to the slowest fastest.+ That was Walker back in 1981, when Nelson Piquet and Carlos Reutemann were fighting it out for the drivers+ championship, when Shergar was winning the Derby and when Bjorn Borg was playing in his last Wimbledon final. Walker was 58. At about the same time there was a most accident-prone driver called Andrea de Cesaris. De Crasheris, they called him. In the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, Ron Dennis, who had just taken over at McLaren, instructed De Cesaris to keep well away from his team-mate John Watson. De Crasheris raced Watson wheel to wheel before smashing into a wall on the first lap. Well, Walker is the De Crasheris of the spoken word, even though Martin Brundle is at hand to hold Murray+s hand and explain what is really happening, as James once did.
I suspect Walker knows more about the sport than he lets on. But he comes from the Eddie the Eagle school of celebrity, where infamy is considered better than no fame at all, and where silly cock-ups show what -a great character+ he is. I+m sorry. I don+t buy it.