George Mikes once said that the English, not being a religious people, invented cricket to give them some sense of eternity. If this is so, then 'Test Match Special' is a sneak preview of heaven itself. This Hundred-Acre Wood of the airwaves was for 34 years the domain of Peter Baxter, whose excellent 'Inside the Box' provides an affectionate and revelatory account of his time as the show's producer. I hesitate to describe it as a must-have book for cricket lovers, because TMS isn't really a show about cricket at all. It's a show about friendship. Fittingly, Baxter confesses that he himself 'was never a great cricketer', so he sought to create an atmosphere that was, in the best sense of the word, amateur. You get a real sense that there's nowhere else he would rather be than sitting in that box with Aggers and Blowers, CMJ and Johnners, the professional curmudgeons Boycott and Trueman, the Boil, the Alderman, Bearders, and of course the great John Arlott. So many characters, so many wonderful anecdotes. We may as well get it out of the way quickly, because you'd feel short-changed if it weren't here: yes, Baxter describes when Brian Johnston dissolved into wheezing giggles live on air. It's arguably the most famous, and certainly the funniest wireless broadcast of all time. "Oh, do stop it Aggers!". Even thinking about it is enough to make most people smile. Baxter clearly loved Johnners: long after his death, he hauled in a bust of him for the series-deciding Oval test match of 2005 so the old boy could be there when England re-took the Ashes. His humour, though, was not to everyone's taste. "Oh Johnston" sighed EW Swanton once, after Johnners had pulled his braces during his summary as if to snap them back, "Always fourth form". John Arlott was a very different man, the French horn to Johnston's kazoo, and a broadcaster of genius. Only Arlott could have described Clive Lloyd's batting as "The stroke of a man knocking a thistle top off with a walking stick". He wasn't above joining in the fun and games, once skewering Fred Trueman, who had just said for the umpteenth time that "I just don't know what's going off out there", with the response "But Fred, you're paid to know what's going off out there". Oh, to have been listening when that exchange was broadcast! Change and decay in all around we see; alas, they have come even to the commentary box. While Baxter doesn't quite say it, one gets the distinct impression that the modern TMS isn't altogether to his taste. Test Match Special, he says tartly, is popular 'precisely because it does not sound like the rest of Radio 5 Live'. It still has its moments of course, especially those marvellous free-wheeling discussions during poor weather, which are so good one feels somehow cheated whenever the rain is interrupted by cricket. Blowers is still happily describing pigeons, Christopher Martin-Jenkins' laconic wit remains dryer than a drained martini glass - never mind not moving your lips when you read; CMJ doesn't even do it when he talks - while Aggers and Boycott are now an established and hysterically funny partnership in their own right. Can it last, though? Without Baxter, we must fear the worst. Whatever happens to the show in the future, his book is a splendid evocation of its golden age: in the words of AA Milne, 'Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them along the way, in that enchanted place at the top of the forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing'. Somewhere in the world, right now, somebody is listening to that clip of Aggers and Johnners, and laughing until it hurts. For that, and for so many other memories, we are all in Baxter's debt.