SIX months of sacrifice, of painstaking preparation and almost monastic dedication, funnelled into 18 minutes of lung-burning, sinew-stretching, do-or-die effort . . . No matter how you think about it, that really was quite a commentary that Peter Drury pulled out at the Boat Race on Sunday.

Don’t forget to factor in the conditions, as well. Our man was on choppy water from the get-go, battling the kind of crosswind of anticipation that would sink your more lightweight microphone wranglers. Even now, a full year after this hallowed sporting museum piece fled the careful curatorship of the BBC, people expect the Boat Race on ITV to be a bit (how should one put this?) redbrick. They never will again, though, after 2006, when Drury spoke like a man who had chopped up and swallowed all those books the Oxbridge boaties might have read if they hadn’t been out rowing.

You or I may have seen the usual set of students barrelling up a river in a narrow craft. Drury saw a gilded panoply on which timeless heroes who had “invested their lives, bodies and souls” were “buffeted and blasted by one afternoon of raw mother nature” in the pursuit of “abiding memory or enduring nightmare”.

Heck, this wasn’t commentary, it was engraving. Here was Drury as Oxford trooped up to receive the cup and, shortly thereafter, lob their cox into shallow water in the time-honoured manner: “No space remains in their considerable collective heart to accommodate yet more happiness.” I’m not exactly sure who was the last person to speak a sentence like that in a live sports broadcasting context, but I would hazard a guess at Henry James.

Drury wasn’t even thrown off course by that highly collectible, pre-watershed moment when we went on board with the Oxford cox, just in time to hear him say, “OK, we’re going to f***ing attack this boat now.” Back to Drury: “Seb Pearce, there, exhorting the Oxford boat to find their rhythm.” Memories of Frank Clark, in his time as the manager of Nottingham Forest, urging his team, in crisp digital stereo, to “play the f***ing thing short” — and of John Motson stepping in to say, “Play the ball short is what they are saying on the Nottingham Forest bench.” What would we do without these translators?

With a reference to the Thames as “250 miles of historic river,” Gabby Logan’s introduction to the coverage (“no sporting contest produces a greater gap between success and failure”) was itself a good 75 yards of historic bull. Yet perhaps the slightly neurotic vamping of the event’s significance and the anxiously persistent reminders of its “special place on the calendar” overlook the cheerful fact that the British will watch a race between pretty much anything — it might as well have been two flies climbing a window.

STILL, let’s take ITV’s word for it that within this seemingly simple encounter lies an entire manual of life’s lessons for those who know how to look. In which case, the most important of those lessons to take with us must be “pack a pump”. Oxford did so, Cambridge didn’t, and, as a result, from the historic Harrods book depository onwards, Cambridge were taking on the equivalent of another man in unwanted water. When we visited the Cambridge cox, he appeared to be working from somewhere deep inside an aquarium, and the puzzling nature of the images forced the producers to leave him before he could entertain us with so much as an f-word.

Someone else who took on the equivalent of another man last weekend was Neil “Razor” Ruddock, who went on Celebrity Stars In Their Eyes to give us his Neil Diamond. When the former Liverpool FC hard man burst out of the famous misty portal there was certainly an uncanny resemblance. Unfortunately, it was an uncanny resemblance to Mel Smith. Except that, if I remember my Not The Nine O’Clock News correctly, Mel sings better than Razor does.

Ruddock’s rendition of Song Sung Blue sounded exactly as it might have done if Neil Diamond had come from London and played for Tottenham. “You can sing it wiv a cry in your voice,” Razor thinly warbled. One was just wondering whether this was the worst Celebrity Stars In Their Eyes appearance, when Jennie Bond, the former royal correspondent came out and started to impersonate Debbie Harry, of Blondie. The ensuing 3½ minutes would have sunk even Drury.