At school the teachers called Ian Robertson “Chatterbox”. It was “Chatterbox! Silence!” and “Chatterbox! Stop it!” and “Chatterbox! Shut up!” And he would tell them: “Yes sir, sorry sir, but I just mean to say, sir!”
Robertson has had a lot of jobs since. He has been a player, teacher and coach, he has written books, worked for newspapers and TV, but he has only ever had one real calling. He is a radio man, and almost always has been. He has been in the business for 47 years, chatterboxing away on the BBC, where his peppery Edinburgh brogue has become the voice of rugby.
Happy retirement to Ian Robertson, last of the BBC’s cherished sporting voices
On Saturday, Robertson will do his last commentary, England versus Australia at Twickenham. He is 73 and his eyes are not as keen as he would like them to be. “It’s the right time,” he says. “I can still do it but it’s harder work.” He decided the World Cup in Japan would be one trip too many “for an old fossil like me”. It is the end of an era. Robertson learned the trade from broadcasters such as Bill McLaren, Bryon Butler, John Arlott and Brian Johnston. For those who grew up listening to him, it feels as if he is the last in the line of the great radio raconteurs.
Robertson does not buy it but he is a modest man, especially when talking about his playing career. He won eight Scotland caps, most of them at fly-half. There were a couple of great wins: one against South Africa, another – his favourite – against England, 14-5 at Murrayfield. Robertson had quick feet, a sharp pass and a cunning way with a dummy. “When it came to tackling I was a complete coward but then I had some good back-row forwards who did that for me,” he says.
Robertson’s game got him into Cambridge, where he did his postgraduate studies. At his admissions interview, with one Dr Pratt, he walked into an empty room. “Suddenly, two hands appeared from behind the substantial desk,” Robertson remembers. “In his hands was a rugby ball which he chucked at me while bellowing the single word: ‘Catch!’” Robertson did. “Even more miraculously I drop-kicked the ball – left-footed! – across the room and into the wastepaper basket.” Pratt came out from hiding, hugged him and said: “You’re in!” Commentary came easy, too.
If something is wrong you simply point it out. ‘He’s struggling a bit today’ is much better than ‘he’s having a howler’
Robertson’s playing career came to a sudden end at 25. He was captaining Scotland in a trial match when he got caught in a gang tackle that damaged both his knees. “It was the cruciate in one leg and the medial in the other, and either would have been enough in those days.” So he went back to his day job teaching at Fettes College, where one of his pupils was a smart, scruffy boy called Tony Blair, who kept coming up with excuses to cut Robertson’s rugby lessons. “Athlete’s foot, ingrowing toenails,” he recalls. “I’m not sure we got on terribly well.”
These days Robertson looks back on his injury as a blessing. “In a sense it was very, very lucky because a vacancy opened up at the BBC.” It was McLaren who recommended Robertson for the job, and who taught him one of the most important lessons about how to do it. Be kind.
“If there’s something wrong you simply point it out rather than make a West End production of it. ‘He’s struggling a bit today’ is much better than ‘he’s having an absolute howler’. You don’t gain anything from being an assassin.”
Robertson is as quick and canny as he is kind, a shrewd judge of what to say when. He persuaded Nelson Mandela into an interview by telling him “the BBC have promised me a fate worse than death” if he did not get it. Mandela, curious, asked him what that fate was and Robertson replied: “They’ll send me to Robben Island for 27 years.” Mandela laughed, and gave him 20 minutes. Robertson charmed Elizabeth Taylor into letting him stay a week at her house while he was researching a book on Richard Burton. She was still sending him Christmas cards a decade later.
After all that, Eddie Jones must seem easy. “Eddie and I get on well because I know to let him win every argument.” It must help that Jones knows, along with everyone else in rugby, that underneath it all, Robertson is driven by his deep and abiding affection for the game and the people who play it. “You do the job because you love rugby, and if you love rugby you paint the best picture you can but you make sure it is still a true picture.”
He worries that national teams have too many foreign players, and hates the way Lions tours are being cut, but he still thinks the game is bigger and better than ever. “I’m not a doomsday prophet. The game itself is hugely physical but there’s still plenty of good, entertaining rugby going on.”
As I leave, he pulls out his notes for Saturday’s game, and starts practising his pronunciation of the Australian players names. “Tatafu Polota-Nau,” he says, rolling each syllable, “Allan Alaalatoa.”
He describes commentary as “the last of the ad lib shows” but he puts a lot of work into making it look easy. “This is my last game. I mustn’t make a bollocks of it.” Of course he will not, he never has.