“Excuse me, sir, but surely you mean between A and C?”’
“Precisely. The initial link is between A, here, and C, and then ... Major Vindakji, you have something to add?”
“Forgive me, Colonel, I think the first connection must be from C to D.”
“Absolutely right, C with D. Now then ... Lieutenant Patel?”
“Surely, Colonel, it must be B with D.”
“Lieutenant, I’m delighted you took the point. As I was saying ...”
More interruptions ensue, and as the students are filing away one turns to another and says: “I tell you what, Pandit, that Carruthers doesn’t half know his stuff.”
“The words of command”, then, is an ineffably British principle whereby it matters not one iota what you say so long as you say it with absolute confidence in your own omniscience. Do so, and you will be taken at your own estimation.
And so to Alan Green, the Carruthers of Radio 5 Live. The self-styled “Greeny” may resemble fellow Ulsterman Eamonn Holmes’s cockier elder brother, yet lacks a shred of the self-deprecating charm. What he does have is impregnable self-belief.
That this lies in inverse proportion to his talent is itself the reverse of the point: we British remain suckers for the words of command.
At his commentary best, Greeny is pretty good, though not a patch on the late Bryon Butler or the extant Geordie John Murray. His best is a captive beast seldom allowed its freedom, however, because seldom is a match sufficiently captivating to disabuse him of the belief that the players, coaches and official have conspired to torment him.
Not being a psychiatrist, I am in no position to diagnose Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which an American dictionary of mental disorder defines as “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy.
"The narcissist is excessively preoccupied with issues of personal adequacy, power, and prestige. Narcissistic personality disorder is closely linked to self-centeredness.”
Greeny, self-centred? Pah! Yet barely a game goes by without expressions of rage that he, Green, should be forced to endure the incompetence arrayed before him purely to cause him psychic pain.
Instructive here is a vignette from the 2010 World Cup. Asked why, with England playing like the executive committee of the council for partially sighted dyspraxics, Joe Cole had not been used in the first game. “I know, I know,” he harrumphed in outrage.
“Joe Cole was on my team sheet for the USA game. I had him on my teamsheet.”
On reflection, he had a point. While Green had spent the previous 20 years sat with a microphone pressed to that capacious gob, Fabio Capello was fiddling about managing teams to league titles in Italy and Spain and a European Cup.
Who was this Italian dilettante to defy his will? Had Greeny not made himself plain? Joe. Cole. Was. On. HIS. Team. Sheet.
Over his hosting of phone-ins, I must lightly brush because without powerful sedatives three minutes is a strict maximum. That these are invariably three minutes in which he patronises callers with the sense denied Don Fabio to echo his own thoughts, while brusquely dismissing Capelloid imbeciles who do not, needs no spelling out.
The self-aggrandisement rivals the bombast, barely a broadcast passing without a reference to his “feud” (minor spat) with Sir Alex Ferguson.
Here we find him on the wrong end of the lofty contempt he more commonly doles out to others – Graham Taylor, for instance, whom he had replaced in the commentary box recently for lightly teasing him on air; and more infamously Mark Saggers, with whom he once refused to share a plane, and a fine broadcaster whom he he drove into the arms of rival TalkSport.
The question of how and why Alan Green’s bosses are willing to put up with the queeny tantrums, imperious behaviour and forays into the arena of Seventies stand-up (Ofcom censured him in 2004 for suggesting that the Cameroonian Eric Djemba-Djemba was talking comic pidgin English during a Socratic dialogue with a referee) intrigues many, but the answer is depressingly simple.
The words of command hold sway in BBC high command as much today as they did in Colonel Carruthers’ Calcutta lecture room in 1942.
Henry Winter
Mark Ogden
Duncan White