So howzat for a great night out? Henry Blofeld speaks ahead of Shrewsbury show

"Hello Henry, how are you?"

But legendary cricket commentator Henry Blofeld guffaws. "If you want an honest answer to that question, it's far too early in the day for it to be anything positive," he replies in his rich, plummy tones.

It's just gone midday. The voice of cricket is nothing if not mischievous.

Blowers comes to Shrewsbury's Walker Theatre next month, where he will be joined by long-time Test Match Special producer Peter Baxter as part of their Rogues on the Road tour, where the pair talk about their escapades while following the England Test team around the globe.

It fell to Baxter keep his errant broadcasters in check and make sure everything ran smoothly. But working with Blowers – not to mention his partner in crime Brian Johnston – he certainly had his work cut out. "There have been moments when I've been tearing out my hair, or my glasses have steamed up," says Baxter, who stood down from the TMS team in 2007 after 34 years.

"In the show we talk about some of the funny things that have happened on tour, although they didn't always seem that funny at the time."

For example, 76-year-old Blowers recalls an embarrassing moment on the landing of an hotel somewhere in Nottingham, when he was commentating on a Test at Trent Bridge.

"I got locked out of my hotel bedroom and I was stark naked," he says, conjuring up an image many of us would probably try to avoid.

Then there was an awkward moment at Heathrow following a 1970s tour of Australia. "I asked this gorgeous blonde who I had invited to Paris at the end of it, but when I got to the airport she wasn't anywhere to be seen. Then I saw this dumpy blonde girl who I remembered from a couple of years before, and somehow I had got my wires crossed and phoned the wrong girl."

Needless to say, the trip did not go especially well for either party.

Then there was his encounter with Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe, whose uncouth manners were in distinct contrast to those of the old Etonian. "He would have won a gold medal for spitting, over the medium and long range," says Blowers. "I was forever ducking."

While his older brother Sir John Blofeld ended up a distinguished High Court judge, Henry found that the academic lifestyle was never really for him. After failing his degree at Cambridge "by an innings", he found life working for a merchant bank to be terminally dull. At Eton, he had showed promise as a cricketer, but his dreams of playing the game at the top level were dashed at 17 when he rode his bike into the path of a bus.

But far from traumatised or bitter about the the crash, he has been known on more than one occasion to show his wife the spot where the unfortunate incident took place. "I always have a chuckle," he says. "I always tell her she was jolly lucky the bus driver was alert otherwise she would never have met me."

He says having a sense of humour and being able to see the funny side of almost any situation is a vital tool in having to talk for hours on the airwaves. And he says it helped that Brian Johnston – who was already something of a veteran by the time he joined him in the commentary box in 1972 – had already blazed a trail for their anecdotal style of commentary, in which they were as likely to talk about what they had for lunch as the finer points of a batsman's technique.

This would prove important from the mid-1970s onwards, when it became commonplace for the coverage to continue even when rain halted play. Baxter recalls, though, that not all the TMS team were keen on this development. John Arlott who, with his rich, soupy Hampshire burr, was arguably the first of the new breed of commentators, was one who was reluctant to continue once the precipitation began. "John always wanted to hand back to the studio, and he would sit up the back of the commentary box while we carried on," says Baxter.

"But he would listen to our commentary and he would then want to join in."

Baxter says there is a parallel between the banter among the TMS commentators and that of the presenters on Top Gear. "Both are about a common subject but they talk about other things on Test Match Special, and you don't have to be a petrolhead to watch Top Gear," he says. And just as former Top Gear presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May encountered mishaps on their world travels, it hasn't always been plain sailing for the TMS team either.

There was the time when the crew was preparing to touch down at Bombay airport, but the air traffic control refused to allow the plane to land. "They said they had never heard of us and we had to keep flying round and round in circles. It was only when the pilot said he was running out of fuel that they allowed us to land," says Baxter.

There was also the time in South Africa where Baxter had to stand in a cage while he was searched by a sniffer dog. "I said there's no need to put me in a cage, but the policeman said, 'The cage is for your safety, not the dog's. He's both a sniffer dog and an attack dog, and sometimes he forgets which is which.'"

An infamous moment came on the second morning of a Test in Galle, Sri Lanka, in 2001, when he and commentator Jonathan Agnew found themselves banned from the stadium. "Another radio station had commentary rights and they thought they had missed a trick when they realised they could have charged us for the rights, so on the second day they decided to bar us from the ground," says Baxter. "I sent Aggers where he could at least see the scoreboard and he had to do his best to commentate from that.

"It ended up with the chief executive of the England Cricket Board getting involved. The authorities pointed out that this didn't look very good for cricket, and after discussions over several gin and tonics, they let us in for the afternoon session. I told Aggers to come back in eventually. But I kept him waiting until I had a few gin and tonics."

Despite his long broadcasting career, Blowers is reluctant to talk about a golden age of cricket, although when pushed he does speak of his admiration for the swashbuckling West Indies teams of the 1980s. "But I don't have favourites, I just enjoy the game, and you can't compare teams from different eras."

And for Baxter, it is the 2005 Ashes series where England won the urn for the first time since 1987, that stands out in his memory.

"I remember saying to Jonathan Agnew, 'What other series has there been like this, with such an atmosphere and so much anticipation?'

"I can't think of one to this day."

Blofeld and Baxter: Rogues on the Road comes to the Walker Theatre on April 26. Tickets are £19.50.