BBC2’s new nightly Wimbledon recap show has a stupid name. A name so stupid that it should have been changed dozens of times during its commissioning process. A name so stupid that it makes you want to pinch yourself, just to check that your whole world hasn’t somehow been folded into W1A’s morbid reality. A name so stupid that you daren’t say it out loud, in case you end up inadvertently Candymanning yourself to death. Its name – and brace yourself for this – is Wimbledon 2day.
That’s right. 2day. With a numerical two. Watch Wimbledon 2day for any length of time and you’ll soon understand that it has a numerical two, because Clare Balding keeps having to laboriously explain it to viewers every few seconds with an increasingly exasperated look on her face.
This is only the third day of Wimbledon, and already that number two has become Balding’s own personal hell. It will physically age her. It’ll weaken her bones. By the Wimbledon finals, it will have consumed her totally, dooming her to a life spent pacing around the corridors of Wimbledon’s Gatsby Club covered in tattered robes and self-administered tattoos, growling “Number two, number two, number two” to herself with her eyes rolled back into her head.
Wimbledon 2day has a horrible name. But that’s only part of the reason why everyone hates it – and, let’s be clear, they really do hate it. They hate it because it can’t decide whether it wants to be Top Gear or The One Show, when actually it should be a sober review of matches that people missed because they were working. They hate it because it has a shipped in a pseudo-studio audience who are only there to look bored and go “Weeeey” whenever prompted.
They hate it because, instead of showing recaps of the day’s tennis action, there’s a segment called #Anyonefortennis where we’re subjected to home video footage of toddlers limply holding rackets and looking for all the world like they’re a maximum of five seconds away from having a tantrum. They hate it because the host and guests spend the entire show standing up for no apparent reason. They hate it because they were expecting John Inverdale being smug, and instead they got Clare Balding wrestling with a malfunctioning iPad.
The whole show is a mess, and it’s all down to the fact that it can’t commit. The producers clearly wanted to inject some freshness into proceedings by creating a zany zoinks-a-lummy Timmy Mallett vehicle, but viewers would have preferred a bone-dry conservative retrospective programme. As a result, Wimbledon 2Day finds itself caught between two extremes. In trying to please everybody, it’s pleasing nobody.
All it had to do was stick to its guns. If it wanted to be wacky, it should have been unapologetically wacky from the very start. “This is our show,” it should have said. “It’s a bit dumb, but it’s only on for a fortnight and nobody’s going to die. Now, here’s Bruce Forsyth singing Cliff Richard on karaoke while children pelt him with strawberries”. Do that for a few days and it would have found its audience. It would have annoyed people beyond belief, but that would have been the point.
Instead, it’s capitulating. Yesterday’s second episode suggested that the viewers have won. Balding got to actually sit down, and the audience had been pushed back a little. The match recaps took up more time, and John McEnroe’s edgy jokes about balls were replaced by Tin Henman’s earnest waffle about hydration. Little by little, the original vision of Wimbledon 2Day is receding. At this rate, Clare Balding will have to present the last few episodes in a John Inverdale mask as a nightmarish final act of absolute contrition.
But still, however hard they try to please the tutting tennis fans, that number two will still be in the title. It’s a fat scar, a lingering reminder of what a failed experiment Wimbledon 2Day was. The show can change all it wants, but Clare Balding is still going to have to explain that number two again and again, forever, into oblivion. Pray for her.
