Similarly, Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven would have sounded a good deal less epoch-defining had Jimmy Page swapped his Fender Telecaster for a £5 Argos banjo.
Anybody can point a camera at a gripping sporting event and generate great entertainment. The real test of a broadcaster comes when the sport fails to capture the imagination, or indeed fails to materialise. Such a fate befell the fifth Test at the Oval on Saturday, which was rained off in its soggy entirety.
There is a certain absurdity in the idea that something as grand and important and lucrative as an Ashes Test can succumb to something as piffling and arbitrary as rain. In any case, nobody seems to have questioned why rain should stop play in the first place.
It is, after all, just rain; and not molten lava or flying nails or bubonic plague or any one of a thousand infinitely more hazardous airborne phenomena. Wet-weather cricket, like wet-weather motor racing, might turn out to be quite the spectacle. Still, tradition is tradition, and so the erection of the Centre Court roof at Wimbledon leaves cricket as the only major sport liable at short notice not to happen at all.
Naturally enough, this left the broadcasters with many hours to fill, a task they approached in different ways. Many people enjoy watching Sky Sports on mute and listening to Test Match Special on the radio. On Saturday afternoon, that meant watching Australia capitulate at Melbourne on Boxing Day 2010 while listening to round-the-world yachtsman Sir Robin Knox-Johnston recalling the time he saw some fishermen off Dunedin. Arresting, for sure, but a touch disorienting.
So it fell to us to make a choice. As accomplished and learned as Sky’s battery of former captains are, and as cute as they all look in their matching blue polo shirts, like trainee lifeguards on a team-bonding exercise, there is nothing quite like listening to Test Match Special during a rain break.
With no immediate prospect of play, TMS did us the great favour of getting all the cricket out of the way at the start. Ed Smith, Michael Vaughan, Damien Martyn and Phil Tufnell compiled a composite Ashes XI, before speculating on England's touring party for the return series.
Even in these capable hands, such exercises generally dissolve into mirage in a matter of minutes. What happens if Alastair Cook gets injured? Bring Nick Compton back? Move Jonathan Trott up? Ian Bell goes to three, Carberry four, Gary Ballance at five and a cardboard cut-out of Chris Woakes at six. What about Taylor?
Jonny Bairstow? Ravi Bopara? Did Mark Ealham actually retire, or did he leave it open to interpretation? And so on. Utterly pointless, but rather fun.
Before long, the stage belonged to Jonathan Agnew, whose quest to convert TMS into a form of light entertainment continues apace. After the interview with Sir Robin (repeated from the Old Trafford Test) came another with comedian Paul Merton. Agnew does these celebrity interviews enormously well; laughing at all the right moments, constantly on the cusp of awe.
There are those who regard Agnew as a genuine national treasure, an emblem of an idealised England, a sort of human cake. Any criticism of him is met with a scorn once reserved for traitors, blackguards and Germans: an act of heresy verging on the unpatriotic. Personally, I find him a touch haughty. Still, it seems I may be in a minority on this one.
For the reality is that TMS is Aggers, and Aggers is TMS, and for all their peculiarities you would scarcely wish it otherwise. When the cricket is on, there are few better places than Sky to enjoy it. But when the rain pours and the covers stubbornly refuse to shift, an afternoon in the crackling company of Test Match Special is an afternoon gloriously wasted.
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