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Cricket Badger meets STEPHEN CHALKE - 'One Hell of a Life: Brian Close: Daring, Defiant and Daft''

·59 min·3 clips

Brian Close was still smoking 40 a day during radiotherapy for lung cancer.

1. Cricket Badger Podcast focuses on Stephen Chalk's book One Hell of a Life: Brian Close, Daring, Defiant and Daft. 2. Stephen Chalk is the author and James hosts, and Brian Close matters because Trevor Bailey, Alan Gibson, and Yorkshire colleagues kept describing him with unusual affection. 3. The episode asks why Close still pulled Chalk back into writing after Alan Hill's earlier biography and decades of interview notes. 4. Chalk says he first wanted to write about Close after years of interviewing old players from the 1950s and 1960s. 5. Alan Gibson's description of Close as "a devil of a cricketer" becomes part of the book's back-cover framing. 6. Trevor Bailey's view that Close was the best teenage cricketer he had seen stays central to the argument. 7. The discussion links Close's talent to the unresolved question of whether he was held back by himself or by others. 8. Chalk describes Close as a grammar-school boy from a council house who entered a very different cricket world. 9. Close's early rise included England selection at 18, a youngest-ever Yorkshire cap, and the youngest double of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets. 10. The tour of Australia in 1949-50 is presented as a major setback, with loneliness, ostracism, and suicidal thoughts appearing in his letters. 11. Chalk contrasts the later image of a hard, bruised cricketer with the earlier reports of hypochondria and time on the masseur's table. 12. He says Close was brilliant and "thick at the same time," a phrase from Ken Biddulph that captures the contradiction. 13. Close's refusal to admit fault appears in anecdotes about blaming "the wrong flavour of chewing gum" after getting out. 14. The episode spends time on his cigarettes and horse betting, which Chalk says contributed to relative poverty later in life. 15. Chalk notes that Close still smoked 40 cigarettes a day during radiotherapy for lung cancer. 16. Yorkshire's reluctance to appoint him captain and later criticism of his one-day views show how administration shaped his career. 17. The move to Somerset is described as a reversal in which Close defied Yorkshire's doubts and helped transform the side. 18. Chalk says Close and the West Indian fast bowlers respected each other, and he recounts the 1963 and 1976 short-ball episodes without romanticising them. 19. The tone is conversational, heavily anecdotal, and shaped by long-form memory rather than a scripted chronology. 20. Listeners who know 1960s cricket, Yorkshire history, or Brian Close will get the most from it; listeners wanting light general chat may skip it.

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