Emma Raducanu’s tennis victory is a ‘national moment’. Will Tory privateers leave C4 alone?
I’m not a great fan of British sporting success because it tends to encourage the types who wear Union Jack underwear. At the same time when someone who came to London as a migrant aged 2 pulls of a startling victory,, as Emma Raducanu did at the US Open tennis on Saturday evening, there is a sense of a shared national moment for many. Something that unites if only briefly. The unity is around an amazing sporting success not a desire at least on my part to wave even the smallest flag.
Even the usual right-winger snipers and whingers on GB News haven’t yet managed to work out a critical line.
Amazon have been showing the tennis on a subscription basis but I watched it in my local beard and beer bar in Tottenham on Saturday night on free air to TV (the bar doesn’t show Sky etc, its just too small to make the cost worth it). Channel 4 which at the moment is a State-owned broadcaster bought the rights from Amazon and screened it so that everyone interested not just a few thousand could see it live. Channel 4 reported the peak audience had been 9.2m a significant decision given the short notice of the screening
The Tories of course want to privatise Channel 4- no doubt for the benefit of some of their mates. Sports Minister Oliver Dowden tweeted congratulations to Raducanu. Perhaps he’d also like to tweet thanks to Channel 4 and tell Johnson to leave it alone.
The right winger snipers and whiners on GM News are clearly not trying if they’ve failed to work out a critical line. The more experienced stirrers at the Express (Facebook page q.v.) give us “BBC humiliated as failure to secure Emma Raducanu match exposes ‘irrelevance'”.