I rescued Easter Road from the mists of time

When journalist Bob Kingsley turned up for work on New Year’s Day, 1940, he must - to borrow sports desk parlance - have been sick as a parrot. He was assigned to cover the Hibernian vs Hearts match, the second half of which was being broadcast as a treat for servicemen, but a thick, impenetrable fog blanketed Edinburgh’s Easter Road.

The football commentator - aka Rex of the Sunday Mail - turned up expecting to be sent home early, if he could get home at all. But, to his consternation, the BBC’s head of outside broadcasts, Leo Hunter, informed him that the match would go ahead and he would have to give a commentary.

To the broadcaster’s reasonable questions as to how he could commentate on a game which he could not see and whether they might consider calling it off, the reply came that to do so would alert the Germans as to the state of the weather in Edinburgh, and that on no account must he mention anything meteorological. "Fawlty Towers 40 years ahead of itself," wrote Scotsman columnist and football historian Bob Crampsey in an article published about the legendary game several years ago.

Scots actor and playwright Andrew Dallmeyer was intrigued by Crampsey’s column and has taken the story, which might otherwise have been lost in the mists of time and soccer apocrypha, and turned it into a rollicking half-hour radio play, Playing a Blinder. If Hibs and Hearts fans are well enough at that ungodly hour the morning after Hogmanay, they’re in for a rare treat.

"The minute I read Bob’s wonderful column," says Dallmeyer, "I knew there was a play in it. It’s such a fantastic plot with elements of brilliant farce that you couldn’t make up." Farceur extraordinaire Andy Gray plays the role of Kingsley - rechristened Bob McAllistair by the playwright - and the five-strong cast includes Gavin Mitchell of the TV comedy show Velvet Soup.

How did Kingsley do it? No tapes of the broadcast exist and Kingsley died some years ago, but we do know this much. Since Kingsley could only see two players - Donaldson, the Hearts left-winger, and Gilmartin, the Hibernian right-winger - he organised a system of runners to bring messages to him from the pitch. Dallmeyer suspects this may have resulted in some fairly muddled messages and has a lot of fun with this idea in his script.

Not surprisingly, given the weather conditions, goals poured out like money from a slot machine. By half-time Hibernian were leading 3-2. The referee then realised that he had blown up two minutes short and in the added time Hearts scored twice to lead 4-3.

Ten minutes later, Kingsley watched in horror as the team came back, vanishing like ghosts into a shroud of fog. He responded in the finest tradition of sports broadcasting and simply made up the run of play, talking non-stop for 45 minutes, buoyed only by the knowledge that if he could not see the pitch, few were in a position to contradict him.

Dallmeyer is the author of more than 50 plays and is currently working on a screenplay - about the friendship between the artist Salvador Dal, the film-maker Luis Buuel and the poet Federico Garcia Lorca - when not doing his Christmas day job as a Santa Claus at Ocean Terminal. His script has the commentator starting off very bumbling and embarrassed, but by the end McAllistair is flying in all directions, describing marvellous flowing football with the goalie "leaping like a salmon" to make breathtaking saves.

The reality comes with the goals. Every time either team scores there’s a roar from the 12,000-strong crowd. "We know by the size of the roar whether it’s Hibs or the Hearts because it was a home game for Hibs," explains Dallmeyer. "But then he has to wait for the runner to come round to tell him who scored, so he has to use his fertile imagination and flannel for as long as possible."

Dallmeyer believes Kingsley’s Herculean effort has the potential to become a stage play. "I feel it’s a big enough idea to support two 45-minute halves - a game of two halves - with half-time, of course," says Dallmeyer, who plans to include songs from the clubs, with Hibs supporters on one side of the theatre and Hearts fans on the other. "The audience would be sitting on the pitch. I think it would make a popular, comical piece."

For the record, the score at the end of the match was Hibernian 5, Heart of Midlothian 6, sighs Dallmeyer. A dedicated Hibs fan, he sounds gutted. Shortly after the end of the game, as the exhausted Kingsley went off in search of mild restoratives, he heard voices inquiring for Donaldson, the Hearts left-winger, who had not returned to the dressing room with the other players.

A search party was despatched. He was found loyally patrolling his beat on the far side of the field, calling forlornly to team-mates who had long since gone off and waiting for a ball to emerge from the swirling mist. "He hadn’t realised it was all over," says Dallmeyer.

Playing a Blinder, Radio 4, 1 January, 11:30am