Eleanor Oldroyd Talks to NCLS

 

A career that began with a couple of seconds in local radio news and has taken in most of the great sports venues around the world came under the spotlight at the March meeting of the Nottinghamshire Cricket Lovers Society (NCLS).

Radio Five’s Eleanor Oldroyd, one of Britain’s first women sports reporters, chatted to Martyn Shaw and took questions from the packed room as she reflected on her time on the airwaves.

Eleanor – whose uncle Bob Oldroyd is an NCLS member and a heritage volunteer at Trent Bridge – recalled her childhood in a sports-mad family where she competed with her brothers and where she forged her life-long affection for cricket.

“I’ve always loved cricket”, she said.  “And coming up to Nottingham to visit Uncle Bob meant that I got to know Trent Bridge – it’s still my favourite place to watch, and report on, the game.”

That early affection for cricket manifested itself in her ambitions. “I wanted to be the first ever female cricket correspondent of The Times,” she said.

In fact, she found her voice for sport – literally – in radio, initially for a local commercial radio station but then moving to BBC Radio Shropshire and she has been with BBC ever since.

From those few seconds of sports injects into news bulletins, her expertise, experience and effort took Eleanor Oldroyd to national prominence as a specialist sports reporter - rare indeed for a woman in that era.

“I was an oddity”, she recalled, “There were so few women working in sports broadcasting then.  There was a clear feeling that the men were waiting for you to slip up.

“It was always gratifying when they acknowledged, ‘oh, you do know what you’re talking about’!”

Eleanor recognised that today’s young female sports reporters may have more opportunities but also face more challenging hurdles.

“Of course we got comments”, she said, “but rarely more than that – and anyway if a member of the public didn’t like what I was doing, they had to write to me, or phone the radio station, to register their distaste.

“Nowadays it is too easy for vile comments to be made on social media that, probably, the writer would not do if they’d had to compose a letter and go to the effort of posting it.

“I’m glad I am not starting out now.  And it’s no use telling a young woman in her Twenties not to use their phones or social media – that’s how they run their lives”.

In her sports life, she has worked all over the world, following cricket for Test Match Special and for Radio Five but not confined at all to the summer game.

When Eleanor goes to cover the gymnastics at the Paris Olympics this summer, they will be her thirteenth Olympics!

“I know what you’re thinking”, she joked, “trying to calculate thirteen lots of four years and realising I must be a lot older than I look!”

In fact, with summer and winter Olympics – all covered at various times in her career – she has clocked up that many Games in fairly short order.

“What I love about the Olympics is that mix of disciplines and performances.  And being together with the athletes helps to flesh out their stories.

“I’m really excited to be going to Paris and renewing my gymnastics commentating.  It’ll be great fun.”

Some of Eleanor’s most pressured reporting has come away for the sports fields and are most certainly not ‘fun’.

She has covered many important Royal events, including the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral when she was the only woman reporter, to more recent State occasions.

Eleanor Oldroyd reported live on the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II and the Coronation of King Charles.

“That was a real challenge,” she said.  “There was a point where the King is behind a screen and I had to fill-in until the moment when they declare, “The King is Crowned”.  But because I couldn’t see that part of the ceremony, I had to hope that my timings were spot on.

“On the day, I just got my description finished seconds before the announcement. I’m not sure how it would have gone down if I’d crashed into the proclamation!”

Being the first woman to fill a broadcasting role has been a regular event – most notably when she became the first woman to host Radio Five Live’s Breakfast Show - and she is still the only female presenter of Sports Report on Five Live.

Among the questions from the NCLS audience was one about her favourite sports grounds. She singled out Wimbledon as being both special and a bit surreal given how it is ‘renewed every day’ but reassured the meeting that Trent Bridge was still at the top of her list.

“I’ve been coming here since the days of Derek Randall and I love it to this day”.

Membership of NCLS is £15pa or entry on the night for £5 per session.  Full details of the 2023/24 programme from nottscricketlovers@outlook.com. 

The final meeting of this close season will be on 21st March and will be the Society’s AGM.  International umpire and regular TMS contributor John Holder will be the main speaker.

 

March 2024