The Gatsby Club, despite its name, is not a place of hedonistic gin-drinking and riotous skinny-dipping. In fact, the façade dropped the moment Clare Balding told her guests in the first episode: “It’s soft drinks only, I’m afraid.” Poor Clare: even Graham Norton’s guests are allowed to pretend to drink wine.
Sometimes we have to adapt to survive. Jay Gatsby knew this. And just like the doomed hero of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, this year’s revamped BBC highlights programme has been forced to remake itself. Catching Wimbledon 2day (the much-derided digit, we were told, reflected its place on BBC2) each night during the first week was like watching a time-lapse video of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. On Monday, it was a mess, something that John McEnroe inadvertently expressed when he walked on to the set with the opening line “this is so bizarre”. By the weekend, however, we had witnessed a miracle of evolution.
We may never know what the Wimbledon presenters did to be cast out of their beautiful All England eyrie – a place from where they once cast their beneficent, omniscient eye on events like Saruman at the start of Lord of the Rings – and into the hospitality complex over the road. As for what prompted the decision to dress the set with box hedges and white cabanas and a wipe-clean Perspex bar, so that it looked like before-midnight Ibiza, one can only hypothesise. Perhaps the producers had seen last month’s return of TFI Friday, and someone had told them “The 90s are BACK!”
But Tim Henman is not zany, and a show broadcasting from a leafy SW19 postcode was never going to conjure the anarchic energy of any of the shows it was hoping to be. When camera shots loomed and zoomed from wild angles they suggested less an atmosphere of madcap fun than a dangerous stalker lurking in one of those box hedges, about to pounce on Balding.
Happily, the very social media that the producers were working so hard to win over with their #anyonefortennis hashtag also showed them the error of their ways. By Tuesday the guests, who had been standing around with the self-consciousness of businessfolk waiting to board their first-class Eurostar carriage, were being allowed to sit on stools that look delightfully like marshmallows. And the awful “seeds board”, next to which Lindsay Davenport had stood cluelessly as Balding stuck tennis balls on the faces of knocked-out players, had been filed in a cylindrical upright drawer.
Realising that only a mass blood transfusion was going to enliven its politely cardboard studio audience, the crowd was inched a little further into the background every day, until by Thursday it had disappeared from shot completely. Highlights of the day’s games were allowed to run at greater length, culminating in a stonking 24-minute edit of Friday’s Williams‑Watson match.
And once the format had laid aside its desperate lurch at comedy, it relaxed into some genuinely funny banter, such as the segment on Wimbledon’s new ice baths that led Pat Cash to remark, deadpan: “It can be a little bit embarrassing when you come out.”
Harry Hill would certainly have approved of the video clip that showed his granddaughter hitting a ball into his forehead – so good we got a slo-mo replay. Whether you like the BBC’s round-up packages has always depended on how much you enjoy an overwrought pun – how else would we have known that Thursday was World UFO day, if it wasn’t for Phil Jones?
But this is an audience that appreciates clever, and by the end of the week Wimbledon 2Day was slowly finding its audience. Friday evening’s show boldly opened with the one-minute silence, a reminder of why we love to hang out with these excellent BBC pundits – not because they’re stand up comedians (they’re not) but because they have gravitas and an admirable sense of perspective. Reflecting on the theme, McEnroe joked: “Clare, they’re coming after us on this show – to hell with these people”. And with that, he was back to his best.
