Chris Rattue: Gizmos mean viewers no longer stumped

The brilliant Ashes series has taken cricket into new pavilions, and the furthermost of these was TV's ground-breaking decision to focus a camera on Billy Bowden's mum on the final day of the series at the Oval.

As English cricket stood just a few Geoffrey Boycott chortles away from one of its greatest results, and Australia teetered on the brink of the unthinkable, we not only got a really good glimpse of Mrs B in the crowd but were given detailed information about a hip injury suffered by the dad of our most famous umpire.

It was a nice touch, and a brave decision by the TV people, who presumably took an enormous risk and deployed their Hugh Grant Cam for the job on Billy's mum.

In this, we may have missed Hugh making yet another decision on whether to place his jacket on the empty chair next to him, or some place just out of camera shot.

But not everything was out of shot. It was an enormous relief to see Hugh was still with Jemima Khan, although a touch concerning that she was parked a row in front of him. Stay tuned on this story.

The TV cameras' fascination with Grant at the Oval was just one of many twists in the most memorable of cricket series.

We also found out that Penelope Keith is still alive, and that English comedians appear to take cricket very seriously.

From go to whoa and with all the celebs thrown in between, these Ashes have delivered in spades.

"What a series it has been," former England captain-turned-commentator Tony Greig might have said - if he had time in between detailing how he sought out and harangued poor Billy Bowden at breakfast each morning. From master commentator Richie Benaud's class to the relentless action in the middle, these Ashes will live in the memory.

And for the television viewer, the fascination of it all was not just amplified by the charms of the commentary team.

English cricket - thanks to Channel 4 - has taken to technology the way Shane Warne latched on to text messaging.

This was the last throw of the dice for Channel 4, because the England and Wales Cricket Board has pulled up its free-to-air stumps and banged them down in the world of subscriber television.

And Channel 4 went out in a blaze of glory, with an array of gizmos that would have kept James Bond busy in a dozen films.

Cricket's technological race can probably be traced back to stump-cam, an invention that rates alongside the black highlighter pen in terms of usefulness. Stump cam - a camera in one of the stumps - makes cricket look like a rodeo, with hooves and dust flying everywhere. It sends cricket spike spotters into raptures and the rest of us into the kitchen to make a cup of tea.

But stump cam was a breakthrough. No longer was the middle a mysteriously distant land. And Sons of Stump Cam have been winners. The Ashes TV gizmos included:

SNICKO

The device which can hear the faintest of sounds, and reveals whether a batsman has snicked a ball. It is so loved by the commentators that it has taken on a persona - hence the "snicko" nickname. Has potential for a wide range of uses. Among the stats it has thrown up is that Greig glanced off Bowden 17 times at breakfast during the five-match series.

HAWKEYE

Hawko is most useful in tracking the path of the ball after it pitches so we know, allegedly, whether it would have hit the stumps on lbw decisions. In doing this it effectively turns the batsman in to a ghost, although in the case of England's Ian Bell this wasn't actually necessary.

During the Ashes, the machine was calibrated each morning in the breakfast room by using it to track Greig as he bumped in to Bowden. (On one occasion, Greig veered more than 2m from the scrambled eggs to smack right in to Bowden as he was reaching for the bacon.)

In one of the most stunning moments of the final day at the Oval, Shane Warne spun a ball so violently that Hawkeye went into meltdown and initially couldn't cope - until it recalled Greig's stunning sidestep at the eggs that morning.

THE RED ZONE

Simple really. A big red strip down the middle of the pitch. Every other sport had a red zone and clearly cricket needed one as well.

SPEED SPLITTER

Finally we find out a 95mph fast ball is actually a 65mph medium-paced ball by the time it cracks into a batsman's helmet. Not that this seems to limit the damage said ball does to said helmet or what resides within it. The speed splitter may raise some excitement among lawyers who specialise in defending traffic speeding cases. In the case of the Zimbabwe bowling attack, the splitter has proven that by the time the ball reaches the batsman it often qualifies for a parking ticket.

MAGIC BALL TRACKER

The TV screen ends up looking like DNA, with pretty dots hanging around in mid-air showing what a batsman has done with each delivery. When you're watching the game on this side of the world, and it's getting to 3am, you're probably seeing these sort of dots anyway. Reaches its zenith when the graphic hurls down a complete over of deliveries at once and Boycott announces he would have left every one of them in his playing days. A snazzy addition to world cricket coverage, although it might not hold quite the same sort of fascination on a slow day at Rawalpindi.

SUPER SLOW-MO REPLAY

With such incredibly high definition that you can see each stitch on a cricket ball from 100m. When accompanied by Richie Benaud's history of cricket ball polishing, it becomes absolutely essential viewing. It's not so exciting though for people in the crowd who are supposed to be at work that day.

So what of the future ...

There may not be too many more undiscovered lands for cricket technology, so here's the big one: Let's have Urn-probe, so we can find out once and for all what sort of ashes lie within the urn. Since we've got the technology, let's use it.