SPORT 
Some time in the next day or two, Richie Benaud will do whatever you do with microphones, exit the Oval cricket ground in south London and bid farewell to the world of cricket commentary in Britain.
The moment will be little short of traumatic for armchair cricket enthusiasts, who have come to regard the white-haired Australian's pronouncements in his chosen field with the deference that others reserve for Nelson Mandela and used to reserve for Lord Denning.
Yet the flinty old leg-spinner himself appears profoundly unsentimental at the prospect, as admirers of his terse, almost minimalist, commentating style would no doubt expect.
"It's not a thing where you start thinking about what you miss," he says, his gaze, from wide-set blue eyes, steady as ever. "It's like when you retire from playing. People said to me: 'Will you miss playing?' (I retired at 33). And the answer was: 'Well, not particularly. I have played as much as I want to play and now I'm going to do media work and television.'"
After a playing career in which he rose to captain his country, Benaud has adorned our small screens for 42 years - as long as Doctor Who, and with far fewer personality changes. The full span of this stay at British broadcasting's crease is brought home when he talks about observing the likes of tennis's Dan Maskell and golf's Henry Longhurst during a training course in the 1950s. "The thing that struck me about those two guys was they didn't talk much," says the man who has made an art form out of the eloquent silence. "Sometimes the producer would say into Henry's ear-piece, 'Are you still awake, Henry?' or 'Are you still alive, Henry?'" But "as soon as he saw something where he could add to the picture, he did it."
The future voice of cricket absorbed another important lesson from time trailing around behind horseracing commentator Peter O'Sullevan at Newbury. "He is the best-organised television commentator I have ever seen," Benaud says. "He did all the work before the race meeting. That's why I always get to the ground early these days. It has rubbed off from Peter O'Sullevan. I'm always at the ground two hours before the start of play."
This is a big moment for me. In the pompous, self-obsessed but strangely wonderful world of professional sport, there are few individuals whose integrity, craftsmanship and sheer longevity I more admire than Benaud. I like the way he scours the arena for glimpses of the positive side of human nature, as when England's new hero Andrew Flintoff congratulated Australia's Brett Lee for his brave batting in a lost cause at Edgbaston. This without for a moment causing us to doubt that he also comprehends the game's darker side.
I always felt that a chance to interview the great man would crop up and, over the years, have sought to prepare myself accordingly. I have spoken to him two, maybe three, times on the phone. I have made the acquaintance, via my wife, of one of his French teachers (Benaud's forebear sailed to Australia not from Britain but from France and he and his wife Daphne now keep an apartment there). I have ploughed through a thorough but uninspiring book on his cricketing life by one A.G. "Johnnie" Moyes. I have even travelled to Strasbourg to play for a French cricket team in sight of nesting storks (Benaud is patron of the sport in France).
Now that he has produced a new book, the chance has finally come. And yet, from the moment he rather formally offers me a glass of water in a first-floor meeting room in the quiet hotel near Marble Arch that he and Daphne have used regularly in English summers, I start to feel frustrated. I sense at once that my hopes of using such details to foster at least a veneer of mateyness are doomed.
Indeed, as our conversation proceeds, Benaud never, I think, forgets for a moment that we are both there doing a job. As our time together ends with the FT's photographer cajoling him to "Look a bit happier with yourself", I doubt he has revealed a thing that he didn't mean to. What is more remarkable is that I am left with this impression even though he has answered me with directness, unfailing courtesy and almost too much precision.
Consider his comments on pay television - a touchy subject, given the controversy over the decision by the England and Wales Cricket Board to sell live rights to home Test matches such as the 2009 Ashes series to Sky. Was this a mistake?
"I won't say that it's irrelevant what people think about it, but in a sense it is because there are only two groups of people who have any control over that: the government and the ECB." He goes on to talk about the lists governing what sports events must be available free-to-air in the UK and Australia, concluding: "The people in Australia know that Australian international cricket and World Cup cricket will be on free-to-air, well, for ever, I would say."
But do you think that is important for the health of the game there? I persist.
"It's important to me that I have been able to work in Australia where cricket has always been on free-to-air because free-to-air is the only thing I have worked on. I am lucky to be in Australia where that happens."
I suppose it should be no surprise that Benaud has developed a politician's wariness about offering hostages to fortune when dealing with the printed media. After all, his association with newspapers predates even his arrival on television. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was already writing for the News of the World when I was watching my dad open the batting for Old Whittonians in my carrycot.
At least the fates have conspired to ensure that Benaud will leave us on a high at the end of a series of brain-scrambling intensity between the world's top cricket team and the best England side that I can remember. A most un-Benaud-like staccato "Och" of confirmation escapes him when I suggest it must be exciting to be going out with some of the highest viewing figures he has ever had.
"Och! Absolutely brilliant," he exclaims. "Here I am 42 years in television and this is the most thrilling Test series I've ever seen. I never thought I would say that anything could be more thrilling than 1981 - Botham's year. But this is - this just shades it."
The home side's thrilling renaissance might have surprised both English and Australian fans, much as the French football team's World Cup victory in 1998 shocked and enraptured their fellow citoyens. But this most experienced of all cricket watchers picked up the notion that England would be no pushovers as early as April 2004, after watching them beat the West Indies in Barbados - a win that featured a Matthew Hoggard hat-trick. "Once I had seen that bowling attack, I went back to Australia and I have been saying for a while 'If the bowlers stay fit and they bowl well, they have got a very good chance of beating Australia'," he says, adding deadpan: "And people kept saying, 'It must be terrible to be 74 and losing your marbles.' "
It has been great cricket, all right, but does Benaud, I wonder, agree with a recently issued DVD proclaiming last month's Edgbaston match The Greatest Test? He did, after all, play in a famous tied Test match against the West Indies in 1960. "Well, I think hyperbole is rampant at the moment," he says, choosing his words carefully, as ever. "But it is certainly one of the great Test matches ever. It would be my moment of the summer."
The next visitor is in the lobby. Time is running out. But I do want quickly to touch on those French lessons. They seem to me symptomatic of another admirable Benaud characteristic. This could be summed up in the phrase "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing properly."
"Yes, we decided we wanted to learn French," he says. "I can make myself understood. Daphne's very good. She can actually talk back to them. Neither of us had done any examinations, well, me since 1946 and Daph since she left school in the fifties. So we found it absolutely enthralling to do, but difficult, very tiring."
And then, just for a second - what do you know? - I think the mask slipped to reveal the inner Richie peeping out. "We used to get home and do homework and finished up dreaming in French at one stage. I thought this was going a bit far."
You are a tough nut to crack, Mr Benaud, but go well.
'My Spin on Cricket' by Richie Benaud is published on September 12 by Hodder & Stoughton. Price £18.99.
