The BBC doesn’t understand Wimbledon

The tennis is great, but an equally impressive aspect of Wimbledon is how well it has managed tradition. When I visited last week, the first time in a decade, everything was beautifully and reassuringly familiar. The clean thwack of the rackets, the running of the ball boys, the military-style precision and bearing of the ball girls. The portly line judges peering over blue-striped bellies, hands splayed on white-trousered knees, exhibiting all the concentration and intensity of a surgeon about to make his first cut. Naturally, one was the spit of James Robertson Justice.

How do they get the line judges so right? Do they hold auditions up and down the land, looking for Margaret Rutherfords and Captain Haddocks and the occasional Charles Hawtrey? The public spaces, too, are characterised by constancy. The huddles of kids hunting autographs, the floralled women and Panama’d men up from the Home Counties, the fierce-eyed tennis fanatics.