Voices of Football, Part One: Peter Jones, BBC Radio's voice of the game

Another remastered series from the now deceased 200% vault for paid subscribers on Unexpected Delirium kicks off with Peter Jones, one of the BBC's most distinctive ever voices.

If football has changed almost over the last twenty or thirty years or so, one of the more comforting ways to reach back into the past is to delve into the all too rare BBC radio commentaries of matches from days gone by, and in particular to locate the lush, mellifluous vocal range of Peter Jones. Over a period from 1966 from his sadly premature death in 1990, Jones became the BBC’s voice of football in a way that perhaps not even the corporation’s senior television commentary team could.

Blessed with a turn of phrase that could paint a full watercolour for the listening audience in just a few words and a sense of theatre that could turn the dullest of matches into an event, Jones was a truly distinctive voice, of the old school of received pronunciation but timeless in terms of his style and authority.