It is astonishing, when you think about it, that in olden times the only Wimbledon montage was the one that ended the fortnight. How on earth did we make sense of any of it?
This set piece would typically stake its claim as a slightly excruciating camp classic, which would provide clips of the best tennis, before straying into lame shots of stuff like Martina Navratilova accidentally falling into the arms of a male linesman (it's funny cos she actually likes women, innit?). There would follow the usual evocative footage of those perennial Wimbledon stars, the refreshments – Like Pimm's? Then you'll love tennis! – which I understand was subsequently bulk-purchased by al-Qaida for use in its recruiting and training videos. Frankly, nothing motivates you to scramble under rope nets in the shadow of the Hindu Kush like being asked to admire shots of the Henman parents suffering a strawberry to pass those inscrutably pursed lips.
But that, incredibly, was almost it. Fast forward to 2013 – or, if you prefer, get there via a standard "time passes" montage – and there is a very real sense that tennis hasn't actually happened unless it has been cut to something by Coldplay. The BBC is currently running several montages daily – in fact, it is currently running several montages in Today At Wimbledon alone, with last week's day of injury pull-outs naturally forcing immediate deployment of the Casualty theme tune. It's the Say What You See school of incidental music, so I do hope Catchphrase's Roy Walker is invoicing them for the creative philosophy.
Other advances in the medium? Well, in keeping with the modern belief that we never really "know" anyone unless we know what's on their iPod, the uber-montage at the end of each nightly round-up show is set to music chosen by a player.
Quite rightly, Today At Wimbledon is never one to undersell the epic quality of the SW19 action – note the All England Club rises up from the ground in the current title sequence as though it were one of the great ancestral houses of Westeros. But watching the live coverage opt to warm up for what turned out to be Laura Robson's final match with a montage of her set to What Makes You Beautiful, it was impossible not to marvel how very far we've come with all this stuff. Or rather, to wonder idly if that wasn't the montage equivalent of a pat on the bum for the little lady.
Whether the BBC has a controller of montages yet I am afraid I can't tell you, but of course it isn't only the corporation at it, with the All England Club releasing its own montage of each day of the championships, which typically features about six actual tennis strokes, and 60 shots of the crowd doing atmospheric stuff such as using their phones or applauding Royal Box liggers or having summer berry related fun.
In the wider sporting world, furthermore, the montage increasingly feels like broadcasters' answer to pretty much anything, with the public's appetite for insta-nostalgia seemingly insatiable. We can only conclude that broadcasters' montage units are the most rapidly proliferating departments, as a generation of producers schooled on lo-tech Rocky beating state-of-the-art Drago in the cold war to the soundtrack of Hearts on Fire have inherited the earth. It increasingly feels like madness for commercially-minded musical outfits not simply to focus all the energy on writing songs whose lyrics are primarily suited to sporting montages. (I already assume that's what Cast did with Walk Away, which I've seen laid over approximately 17,000 images of sporting disappointment over the years.)
Perhaps, at the current rate of technological advance, by 2023 sports fans will simply be able to buy rose-tinted, Total Recall-style memory implants of days at Wimbledon they never even had, lovingly set to the Wanted's Glad You Came. Ditto the Olympics or the Ryder Cup or today's second-round defeat to Blackburn, which will come rushing back as though they happened yesterday. Which is quite a feat, considering they only took place that afternoon.
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