MURRAY WALKER:
THE LAST WORD


By Christopher Hilton
Published by Haynes Group

If you live in a country that doesn't receive ITV's Formula One feed (and the BBC's before that), you're probably wondering what all the fuss was about. But for everyone else, Murray Walker was as much a part of Grand Prix racing as Ferrari.

Certainly, the ultra-excitable guy with the ultra-distinctive voice (actually, there is a famous quote from Murray in this book on the matter: "... a very large part of what success I've had, in my opinion, is due to the fact that I happen to have a voice that suits my sport. I am dealing with a harsh, aggressive, fast-moving sport, and I have a harsh, aggressive, fast-moving voice", p.11) could polarise F1 fans as much as, say, Jerez '97 did, but I will be surprised if even those who claimed to be less than enamoured of Murray will find his silence strangely deafening when they set up camp in front of the TV to watch the 2002 season kick off with the Australian Grand Prix next March.

As hard as I try otherwise, it's difficult not to approach each book with some kind of preconceived ideas about what I'm in for. And this time, I should confess, I wasn't expecting much. Christopher Hilton is a very prolific and undoubtedly popular motorsport author who has been on the scene for years. Unfortunately, with the exception of 'Ayrton Senna: As Time Goes By', I find his particular style of writing extremely hard to stomach. Generally speaking, it's too melodramatic for my taste. I also find him to be a very invasive type of biographer (the book is supposed to be about the subject, not the author, and yet he seems to insert himself into the story at any given opportunity). That his books often seem to be borne out of blatant opportunism also probably has something to do with me being rather cynical about anything with Hilton's name on it, although, like I said, it hasn't stopped an awful lot of people from buying – and, apparently, enjoying – his books.

This book does exhibit all the hallmarks of Hilton's work that I generally find so unappealing, with the added 'bonus' of what Hilton describes in the acknowledgements as 'delightful and affectionate cartoons'. I think they make Walker look like a crazed Japanese officer from a 1940s war comic and are completely unnecessary, so I guess we'll also have to agree to disagree on that one.

Having said all that, it came as something of a surprise that this book was, if not delightful, then at least not completely unpleasant.

This is in no small part due to the fact that Walker, as Hilton points out in his introduction, has lived so many lives. For someone who has spent such an extraordinary number of years in the peculiar kind of spotlight that only Grand Prix racing can attract, it is astonishing to think just how little his millions of viewers know of the man himself. Hilton does a good job of initiating the reader into Murray's pre-commentary life, and it makes for an extraordinarily amusing tale.

Like virtually all men of his generation, he was in the army, where he spent his time at war bolted into a tank. This makes for a few good anecdotes, a couple of which are reproduced in the book, but my personal favourite came from his civilian life as an advertising executive. Recounting his efforts to promote Aspro to the potentially lucrative Indian subcontinent, Walker recounted:

"One of the problems with communicating the product benefits of Aspro was our inability to communicate with them, because they couldn't read and even if they could there were no newspapers. The basic way was to take advertising space on radio Ceylon, which was booked three years in advance.

"However ... in the course of our investigations we discovered that Indians, as a race, are very keen on bagpipes. We recruited eight bagpipe-playing Indians. When they'd finished playing ... an Indian businessman literally erected a folding soap box and said to the villagers 'here I am, here today and gone tomorrow, and I'm here to tell you about Aspro. Have you got dandruff? Have you got piles? Do you get headaches? Ulcers? This is what you need ..." (p21-22).

It's not, as the title, suggests, 'The Last Word' though. For one thing, I find it very difficult to imagine that we have seen or heard the last of Murray just yet (while he's unlikely to commentate again, I'd be surprised if he doesn't pop up somewhere from time to time). Also, a few months ago, Murray signed a squillion-pound publishing deal for his life story. If there is to be a last word, let it come from the man himself.