Bodyline!!!

"Australia's writers showed their claws,
Her backers raged, her batsmen shook,
Statesmen consulted — and the cause?
Our bowling was too good to hook."

So wrote Douglas Jardine, the captain of the MCC team that toured Australia in 1932-33. Seventy-five years ago on Sunday, the most fascinating, most controversial, most ill-tempered cricket series began Down Under, yet it was notable for some fantastic cricket and some great stories of derring-do on both sides.

We like nostalgia here at The Times  (we are English after all - harking back to former glories is what we do best) and what started out as a humble suggestion from your blogger to the sports editor that it would be nice to mark the occasion with an article has morphed into a five-day series of features, beginning in Saturday's Times with CMJ's take on cricket's darkest hour, plus a timeline and lots of archive material.

That will be followed by John Woodock, former editor of Wisden, on Jardine on Monday; David Frith, the cricket historian, on Harold Larwood and Don Bradman on Tuesday; Murray Hedgcock, an Australian writer who was taught at school by the Aussie Bodyline captain Bill Woodfull, on Wednesday; and Simon Barnes on the whinging Aussies and Ben Macintyre on the diplomatic row to wrap it up. Plus lots of space-filling rambling from me.

But that's not all: a Bodyline podcast is already up and downloadable from this link. Hosted by Mark Chapman, of Radio 1, it features Hedgock, CMJ and yours truly and is a lot of fun.

And then, the coup de grace, we have exclusively got hold of Douglas Jardine's video diaries for the tour. Well, sort of. I co-wrote them and Jardine is played in a rather shorter, more Jewish way to how you would expect by the excellent comedian Andy Zaltzman. Nonetheless, we hope you find it fun and much of the dialogue, smutty jokes aside, comes from what was originally said or written 75 years ago. The first one is online now, with four more to follow from Monday. Enjoy - and let us know what you think of the whole shebang.