I now have over 56 books about the unnecessary hoarding of things

There was a bit of BBC’s Wimbledon coverage tonight where they were showing a legends doubles game. I can’t remember who was playing – I wasn’t paying that much attention. One of them was the one who says the line about discontinuing the level of seriousness being projected by a tennis official.

It was good that the BBC were showing this on prime time televison: they did mention that there were proper games by current tennis professionals going on, but they were showing the old men play in a match which was relatively meaningless.

In this kind of game there is a lot of showboating and having a laugh. There was a bit where one of them was called for a foot fault on a serve and he called for a video replay. That was a joke! There aren’t video replays in tennis matches for over-50s as they are practically meaningless. The joke got a good reaction from the Centre Court crowd  and the BBC commentators.

My initial reaction was that this was quite a niche joke for so many people to enjoy. Frankly I doubted that everyone in the crowd even understood the joke. And, yes, I did think it was quite middle class. But then I realised how much more annoying I have found BBC’s dumbing down of comedy over the last couple of years. I would much rather my license fee pay for coverage of old men playing sport doing jokes that people are only laughing at because they used to be young men who were good at sport – rather than it actually being funny – than laughing at an unfunny man dressed as a woman saying things that aren’t funny that a lot of people think is funny because they are fucking cretins.

In short: even though it wasn’t funny and it was very niche a middle-aged man making a joke about not being able to appeal about a quite detailed infringement in the rules of tennis is funnier than 90% of comedy broadcast on BBC1 in 2013.