Does Alastair Cook still say ‘ahm’ every other word now that he’s a professional broadcaster?

We sat and watched a 30-second Alastair Cook interview so that you didn’t have to.

The most damning indictment of Britain as a country is that some people used to think Alastair Cook was ‘well-spoken’ even though he is actually The. Worst. Public. Speaker. Ever.

Throughout his captaincy, Cook’s post-match interviews were 50 per cent English and 50 per cent a weird hybrid of ‘um’ and ‘ah’ of his own devising.

Cook is a broadcaster now. An actual broadcaster. A man paid to talk. He’s doing some stuff for the BBC and it looks like he’ll be appearing on Sky too.

As a rule of thumb, pretty much everyone who has ever played international cricket has something interesting to say about the sport. We’re hoping that Cook’s no exception and that all that relentless ahm-ing was just a symptom of him having to answer questions while simultaneously scrutinising them for potential traps.

Today we got an early sighter of Cook in action in his new career in the form of a 30-second clip on Sky Sports in which he says that it’s hard to win away from home and not much else.

We counted the ahms. There were four – which is actually not that bad because, to be fair, we all have our, you know, verbal crutches that we, like, use to buy ourselves a smidgen of thinking time.

The four break down as three in the first six seconds – which is very bad – and one at the very end. The middle bit was not very much at all like Alastair Cook talking and therefore sort of promising.