Dougie Donnelly has cause to be extremely grateful to the honesty and integrity of Indian golfer Shiv Kapur. At the recent Volvo China Open in Shanghai, we were able to enjoy the delights of the revolving restaurant on the 47th floor of the Doubletree by Hilton Hotel, which was our home for the week. The nighttime views of the city are amazing and it was whilst sampling these delights for the first time that my esteemed colleague made his uncharacteristic error. He placed his wallet and credit cards on the shelf beside the table, without realising that this was actually the static part of the tower, within which our table was rotating. In a fit of absentmindedness that's hard to understand from a Scotsman, he didn't notice that his aforementioned source of great riches was disappearing around the room. (Well to be more accurate, it was stationary while we disappeared). Thankfully, New Delhi's finest spotted the treasure trove as it crawled regally past his table, (or more accurately as his table passed it …). Kapur is one of the sharper golfers on Tour and was able to deduce from the Platinum American Express card that the gold-encrusted pouch did indeed belong to DD and returned it to its owner with a certain amount of glee. It was a particularly exciting moment for Warren Humphreys and myself, as we'd never seen Dougie's wallet before.
A week or two later we were enjoying rather different delights on the tropical island paradise of Mauritius. Sun, sea, sand and sailing … what more could a man want? During the commentary I was comparing the home-loving Thaworn Wiratchant to the globe-trotting Thongchai Jaidee who "had spread his rings, er, wings around the world". It was an innocuous slip of the tongue, hastily corrected. I sailed blithely on without even noticing until the producer guffawed in my ear. What started as a guffaw rapidly turned into hysteria as the whole production area collapsed in giggles. The producer always has an open mic to me so I hear everything that's going on "backstage". Being an experienced broadcaster of over 30 years you might think that it would've occurred to me to remove my headphones, thereby removing the source of the trouble. However, at that point I must have lost my presence of mind and with "cans" still firmly affixed to ears, corpsed.
Dominique Boulet alongside me tried valiantly to keep going, but failed miserably. The Director, in a state of near paralysis himself, resorted to putting up leader boards whilst order was restored. There was total silence for two minutes, but fortunately in television the picture invariably has a story to tell and I doubt if anyone noticed the prolonged absence of comment; unlike in radio, where silence doesn't work too well for the most part. Many years ago whilst reading a long list of football results on BBC Radio, my colleague Mark Saggers and I triggered each other off (I can't remember the cause now) and we both ended up like hysterical schoolboys in a heap on the floor. He somehow kept going whilst I heroically left the studio.
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