NICK UTECHIN talks to cricket commentator Henry Blofeld prior to his Evening with Blowers at the Oxford Playhouse next week

It is a vexing question: what and who exactly constitutes celebrity culture' these days? There are the obvious fools who live and die by television exposure, and then there are the subtler performers who enter this curious field: I've seen a couple of them recently - Rabbi Lionel Blue and Sir Clement Freud - and now an Oxford audience will choose to see how Henry Blofeld survives a couple of hours at the Playhouse next week.

I wish had had time to walk down the High and ask a random selection of passers-by who they think Blowers' might be. Frankly, you either do or do not know that Blofeld is one of the main weapons that BBC Radio launches every year on Test Match Special, that most extraordinary of radio programmes that could be a mere daily eight hours or so of cricket commentary but, for so many, has turned into an unbeatably iconic radio programme in its own right (but beware - see later how Henry, icon of icons, worries about the programme's future).

Henry Blofeld became' Blowers' in 1972 because of Johnners' (Brian Johnson, of course), who begat Aggers' (Jonathan Agnew), out of John Arlott (Arl') and The Boyle' (Trevor Bailey). Already, I feel that I may be losing readers by the minute, for you either love Test Match cricket or not - and you either love the way that game has been described on the wireless for a good many years or not.

What Blowers does on the radio is professionally brilliant. There are many splutterings of "Oh, I say", or "My dear old thing" - and, on occasion, non-PC pieces of verbiage that just erupted when no red buses are passing the Oval on the instant. But the programme's secret over the years, he told me, was that "I just took on board what Brian Johnson said: 'It's a collection of friends who come along with sandwiches to the cricket and talk about it'."

Henry Blofeld was a proper cricketer in his own right, scoring a first-class century against the MCC at Lord's aged 16 playing for Eton. One year later, his life changed: "I cycled into the side of a bus and was in a coma for five weeks. Who knows what might have been? Middlesex were, I think, looking at me. Perhaps I went up to Cambridge too early after the accident. I was thrown out after two years because I was bad at exams, but got my Blue against Oxford in 1959 (defeated)."

I asked who his cricketing heroes were and he hesitated ridiculously, which was nice: he was actually thinking about it: eventually came the names of Gary Sobers and Keith Miller.

And today? "I don't really know any of them. I wish England could play properly two days in a row."

The City of London called - "I loathed it!" - and three years on, in 1962, Blofeld fell into the arms of The Times as a cricket journalist. And thence to TMS a decade later, where, in terms of public consumption, he has since rested. In the early 1990s, he defected to Sky - "On the advice of my bank manager, but I talked too much for television. TV is very boring!" - but was lured back to radio in 1994 after Brian Johnson died.

He deals in his show anecdotally with such characters as Johnson and Arlott, but does not talk about the game of cricket directly.

"It's humour I'm after, and I want to appeal to as many people as possible - women especially!" But getting him on the subject of TMS, I faced an unexpected tirade.

"One of the dangers, I fear, is that the atmosphere is going to change. It's run now by Radio Five Live, and they want to make cricket sound more like football. The programme has very distinctive voices and styles, especially when there's no actual cricket being played and we just talk. But some of the newcomers do not have much distinction."

For true believers, this is becoming serious stuff.

"Test Match Special has always been a bit like an old London club, and if you change it, it's bad. This isn't really understood by the bosses, who want to get the young on board. Now this isn't a bad thing, but I can see it sinking into the blancmange of anonymity."

I asked Blofeld if he was going to stay with the programme: "I don't know if they'll want me to do anything this year."

While waiting - or not - for the call back to the commentating microphone, Blofeld is happy just to be Blowers', taking his show around the country and talking about his life and times. Subjects that might come up are his mother - "A woman of great intelligence, fads and fancies, who had the misfortune to bring me up alone during the war" - or, perhaps, his own love of humour - "Wodehouse is terrific, the funniest writer England has ever produced" - or even his views on political correctness - "All this chairperson business - stuff the lot of them!"

My dear old thing, the two hours will simply fly by.

An Evening with Blowers is on Friday, April 18, at 5pm. Box office: 01865 305305. Also Reading Concert Hall on April 24. Box Office 0118 960 6060.