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Wimbledon: Players, pundits and personalities

2017-06-30T13:50:52+00:00

John Barrett (prepared for all weather conditions in shorts and a jumper), Virginia Wade, Dan Maskell and Gerald Williams in 1989

It is a year of anniversaries for the BBC and Wimbledon this year. 2017 marks 80 years of TV and 90 years of radio coverage by the BBC. It is also 50 years since the first time the championships were shown in colour.

As the tournament begins, the Genome blog looks at some radio and TV commentators who have brought the action into our homes over many decades and some of the players who have figured heavily in the BBC Genome listings.

Dan Maskell outside the Centre Court commentary box, 1958

Early radio commentaries were delivered by the extravagantly named Captain Henry Blythe Thornhill (Teddy) Wakelam. Wakelam was a rugby player and had commentated on the first Rugby Union match on the BBC earlier that year. But the man who went on to be the voice of tennis had a much stronger association with the sport: tennis coach Dan Maskell made his debut commentating on Wimbledon in 1949. In an interview he gave for Radio Times ahead of the 1956 championships Maskell spoke of the need to know players personally to cover the sport. Maskell covered the tournament until 1991 and is reported never to have missed a single day's play at the championships from 1929 until his retirement.

While Maskell specialised in and was considered the voice of the sport, another stalwart - who has provided Wimbledon coverage for more than 30 years - is legendary commentator Barry Davies. Davies’ early BBC listings are predominately for football and hockey and there are hundreds of listings for Davies on Match of The Day. However, BBC Genome also shows a long association with Wimbledon, on which he has provided commentary since 1983. Davies is still going strong and is at Wimbledon for the BBC again this year.

As well as Wimbledon Barry Davies also commentated on 12 Summer Olympics

Early Radio Times magazines showed a keen interest in the tournament, despite there only being a handful of broadcasts for the first years of coverage. As Wimbledon grew to dominate the schedules it was nearly always given a front cover. From the 1970s onwards, the tennis stars of the day were increasingly featured.

One of the best players of her generation - and having won the French Open in 1976 - Sue Barker was on the Radio Times front cover ahead of Wimbledon 1977. The 1977 event, won by Virginia Wade, saw the centenary of the championships and the listings show that there was a special programme to look back at the “Action, anecdotes, delight, despair, fashion, fun” from the preceding 100 years.

Sue Barker moved into broadcasting following her retirement from playing and after spending some time fronting Sky’s coverage she presented Wimbledon on the BBC from 1993 onwards. From this starting point Barker has become a mainstay of BBC listings - presenting a wide range of programmes including A Question of Sport, Olympics and even a Royal Wedding.

Serve up a blog about Wimbledon and not mention John McEnroe? You Cannot be Serious! McEnroe is another personality who has made the move from player to broadcaster. Magnificent play and a volatile on-court temperament brought him much attention during his playing career. He was on the Radio Times cover in 1979 and in reaching five consecutive Wimbledon finals at the start of the 80s McEnroe featured in many BBC billings just like this. After McEnroe retired from the sport (later to become a regular feature of BBC tennis coverage), players such as Steffi Graf and Pete Sampras took centre stage on Centre Court in the late 1980s and the 1990s.

Steffi Graf at the 1993 Wimbledon Championships

With schedules coming out a week in advance, Radio Times listings have focused on the famous players of the day. BBC Genome shows the preeminent players of the 21st Century have been Roger Federer and the Williams sisters. Venus and Serena have won 12 times since the turn of the century, competing against each other in four of those finals. The second day of the championship is traditionally referred to as Ladies Day with the defending female champion playing her first round match. Last year’s champion will not be able to do that this year however with 2016 winner Serena heavily pregnant and therefore missing the tournament.

Serena (left) celebrating beating sister Venus (right) in the 2003 singles final

Ninety years after first broadcasting from Wimbledon the partnership continues: last year the BBC and the All England Club announced an extension to their broadcast agreement until 2024. Who knows who'll be bringing us the coverage then - perhaps some of the players of today will be tomorrow's radio and TV commentators.

Our World: Satellite of Love

2017-06-23T14:25:45+00:00

Colour covers for the Radio Times did not happen every week until the end of September 1967, so it was a sign of the importance attached to Our World that it was afforded one

“Our World is an audacious experiment in international communications. It is nothing less than an attempt to circumnavigate the globe by television. In spite of many satellite broadcasts in recent years Our World is unique and important because it is the first global collaboration in the making of a programme instead of in the relaying of an event.”

(Hugh Greene, BBC Director General in 1967, writing in Radio Times)

Transmitted live around the world on 25 June 1967, Our World was the first international television link-up on a grand scale, where broadcasters across the globe attempted to share the human experience and establish closer links. It was an immense technical achievement – but was it a success as a programme?

Our World was conceived in late 1965, with the working title Round the World in Eighty Minutes, by BBC Head of Features, Aubrey Singer. It was soon realised it needed the clout of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to get international co-operation, and then more and more countries around the world were drawn in. Eddi Ploman from Swedish TV was appointed Project Manager, Britain’s Antony Jay (a veteran of Tonight and The Frost Report, and later to co-write Yes, Minister) prepared the script, and the French composer Georges Delerue wrote the music. Aubrey Singer remained attached as Project Editor for EBU.

Eventually a transmission date was decided on, though because of the different time zones, while it began at 8pm in the UK, the time it was seen elsewhere ranged from 11am on the US West coast, to early the following morning (26 June) in Australia and Japan. The programme had stretched from 80 minutes to two hours in the meantime.

A briefing meeting was held at the BBC on 4 June 1967 to co-ordinate the international co-operation necessary for the Our World broadcast

Of course, in an enterprise this complicated, things were almost bound to go wrong. However the main problem to fulfilling the original vision was not technical but political. At almost the last moment the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries pulled out of the venture in protest at the Six Day War in the Middle East.

Nonetheless, the broadcast went ahead with the remaining 14 countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Tunisia, the UK, the US, and West Germany. It had been agreed not to transmit anything with a political slant, so the programme was made up of a number of themed sections examining other aspects of world affairs.

First, some new-born babies were shown, to represent the thousands who would be born during the time the programme was on air; This Moment’s World illustrated the instantaneous linking of different parts of the world by satellite; Teeming World commented on the population explosion; Physical Excellence showcased sport and other physical achievements; Artistic Excellence included film-making, opera, and folk, classical and pop music; and a final Technological sequence.

A further 10 countries took the transmission without adding content themselves. As colour television had not really got underway in the UK or Europe, and with no major United States network involved (the US partner was the National Educational Network), the programme was transmitted in black and white.

To put it mildly, Our World was technically complex, as this diagram of the links between television stations around the world via satellite and other links, shows

The programme was co-ordinated from the BBC Television Centre. The gallery of studio TC1 linked the various programme elements and hosted the UK presentation by Cliff Michelmore, while in the smaller TC2, guide commentaries in English, French and German allowed each nation carrying the programme to structure their own coverage.

However the programme is perhaps best remembered for one of the British contributions – not the report from the Scottish new town of Cumbernauld (sorry Cumbernauld), but a live peek at the Beatles at Abbey Road studios during the main recording session for a new song, All You Need is Love.

The Beatles had been contracted to appear in the programme on 18 May. The song to be featured needed to be simple to understand, and between this, artistic exhaustion after the recently released Sergeant Pepper album, and the incipient philosophy of Flower Power and the Summer of Love, the result was one of the more undemanding and childlike of the Beatles’ recordings. The song also needed to be straightforward enough that the recording shown in the programme could be used on the actual disc, which was released, after a few overdubs, on 7 July.

The recording session was treated as a party, with balloons, streamers, flowers, and placards declaring in favour of love and peace. Producer George Martin supervised as usual, and a bevy of Beatles friends helped with the choruses – including members of the Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull, Paul McCartney’s brother Mike and girlfriend Jane Asher, Graham Nash of the Hollies, and Keith Moon of the Who.

Three of the Fab Four get ready to record their new song All You Need is Love, going out live to the world on 25 June 1967, and in the shops 10 days later

Our World’s final sequences showed the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and finally the radio telescope station in Parkes, Australia, referring back to the fact that the programme was made possible by satellite technology.

Reception for the programme as a whole was mixed. Even BBC executives reviewing it afterwards were undecided about its success, the pithy head of drama Sydney Newman opined that it was no good communicating globally if there was nothing to communicate. However, the ratings were very healthy, and the programme attracted praise, not least for the technical achievement and the BBC's initiative and presentation.

It’s perhaps telling that, despite Hugh Greene’s prophesy that programmes like Our World would become commonplace by the year 2000, after its transmission a trend for personalised documentaries came to the fore, with themed series like Civilisation and The Ascent of Man, and the One Pair of Eyes strand.

In the 21st Century, satellite links are commonplace, but the emphasis on communication has shifted towards the personal, and away from the communal or corporate. We are all global broadcasters now.