I'VE been to Wimbledon once – I drove a factory van past it when I had a summer job as a university student. But I’ve never been in the real Wimbledon.
Of course like everybody else I’ve been there annually, as my BBC TV screen echoed to puzzling commentaries. Like oh, ah; very well done; he’s possibly the least talked about possible champion; they’re going to close the roof – this is not what they were expecting; even as it gets dark let’s see what happens; when she strikes the ball cleanly she puts a lot of pressure on her opponent; she was stuck in no man’s land.
All of these commentary gobbets featured in a game between Jasmine Posolini, who is small and girlish, and Petra Kivitova, who is tall and headmistress-intimidating.
I didn’t really care who won, but it’s hard not to admire the BBC camera-work. During a break they had a close-up shot of Petra’s feet, both dangling in mid-air slow-motion, so you wondered if maybe she’d been hanged. Not so. Besides being a head-mistressy tennis-player Petra is also engaged, apparently, and we got a close-up of her expensive red sparkler on her finger to drive the point through.
I no longer watch Wimbledon with the ferocious intensity I did as a lad – those women’s short skirts were positively provocative in 1950's Tyrone – but I still find the pock and cries of despair and the ooohs from the crowd and the run-like-rabbits ball boys and the aerial shots of people strolling around in the summer evening past the ivy-covered walls, and the signature tune – there’s something comforting about all that. It’s Wimbledon, school’s out, welcome summer.
They used to say that Peter Lawford, the suave movie-star, member of the Sinatra Rat Pack and brother-in-law to the Kennedys – they used to say he was so urbane, he’d look naked if not wearing an elegant drawing-room. Watching Joanna Lumley’s Silk Road Adventure (ITV), you tend to get the same feeling. This was a woman designed to sit gracefully in a plum seat at Wimbledon rather that in East India, watching indigenous people shimmying up and down trees in a dark forest or viewing huge sheds and saying how these used to be packed with dynamite! Joanne uses a lot of exclamation mark sentences. Despite having been herself born in India, she manages to gasp at the taste of nutmeg in Jakarta and at the thought of the Dutch East India Company (‘They were like Apple today!) with their cannon, so they could wipe out 90 per cent of the native people. “The message was ‘Don’t mess with the Dutch’ – especially when they were intent on stealing the hugely valuable nutmeg trade from the natives.
It’s all so gaspy and wonderful. Next week, she tells us, she will be visiting the country where she was born – India! And she throws her arms in the air like a footballer who’s just scored. How could she have been born in India and be shocked at the naked brutality of imperialism?
They should export Joanna to Wimbledon. She’d fit right in.
