Can you believe that Virgin Media’s on-screen programme guide refers to a programme called Game, Set and Mats? Even now? In 2018? Where has it been?
It was six years ago that this column first pointed out the discrepancy whereby Barbara Schett went unnamed in the title for presenting Eurosport’s grand-slam tennis highlights magazine, while Mats Wilander received titular honours merely for smouldering gently against the studio’s polished railing in a series of comely polo shirts.
To be clear: we weren’t saying that Mats doesn’t give good smoulder. Nobody in tennis broadcasting smoulders better. But calling the programme Game, Set and Mats rather than Game, Schett and Mats? It was hard to conceive a more open-and-shut case of a woman doing the work while a man, literally, took the credit.
At every subsequent grand-slam, we battered away at that particular glass ceiling on Schett’s behalf, pointing out that granting the Austrian former world No 7 the status for which her name and input were equally screaming would be not just a once-in-a-lifetime win for thumpingly obvious puns, but a significant step towards the rightful recognition of women in the sports-broadcasting workplace. To look around now at the broader feminist pushback on discrimination is to note how far ahead of the wave we were.
Yet only last June, during the French Open, did Eurosport see sense. Even then the company rather unsportingly made a show of having arrived at this decision itself, of its own volition, rather than in response to the overwhelming public pressure built and carefully orchestrated by this newspaper.
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Fine. We weren’t in it for the plaudits. We were in it for the change, and those long years of retrograde corporate stalling will for ever be on Eurosport’s conscience, not on ours.
Clearly no one told Virgin Media, which blithely carries on as if the new sexual-political groundswell were nothing to do with it. Next time an arm of the Virgin conglomerate attempts to virtue-signal by declaring its refusal to stock newspapers that don’t meet the values of its brand, remind it that another sector of its business still isn’t awake enough to change “Set” to “Schett”.
Not that the position of Game, Schett and Mats on the programme planner and its screening always coincides, as anyone who has fruitlessly set their recorder this past week will attest. But a slightly free-form approach to scheduling is the last flaky trait at what is the home of grand-slam tennis. Bulletins from Schett and Wilander aside, we get a bespoke, anchored Eurosport UK offering, with Catherine Whitaker and Jo Durie likeably at large in the Melbourne walkways. Strain hard enough and, up in the commentary box, Frew McMillan sounds like the last thread connecting tennis commentary with Dan Maskell.
Yet here comes the future, with Sky Sports in retreat and Amazon Prime signalling a new era for televised tennis by signing up to stream 37 ATP events from 2019. Will we be entirely comfortable getting Roger Federer through the same portal from which we receive our books, our printer cartridges, and our replacement electric toothbrush heads? We’re about to find out.
Yet already a pressure to innovate can be felt in the host’s packaging of the match pictures from Australia. There’s an effort to make the event echo the ATP Finals — the default model for forward-looking tennis presentation. The players head for the court down a blue-lit tunnel, as if descending into a nightclub. Statistics unfurl from the skies on banners. The words “Tie Break” light up in virtual letters across the net, the way they shiver round the hoardings at the O2. We even get some virtual smoke to accompany the walk-ons, the viewer seeing a different order of visual spectacle from the paying pundit.
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Around the uncertain edges of this, and holding it in place, it feels good to have Eurosport, with its reassuring and even terrestrial solidity. All this, and politically appropriate too. Belatedly.