How to cope without British TV and Radio: Wimbledon Supplement

Here's another post by Mark:

In a series of posts, I have discussed strategies for UK aliens who are missing British TV and radio, How to cope without British TV and Radio; Part 2; Part 3; football supplement; cricket supplement; cricket supplement update (see also the related post World Cup Coverage in the USA). The excitement of the World Cup, and England's recent exit (the ultimate antidote, England fans, if you haven't already listened to it, is found in Baddiel and Skinner, Podcast 11: The Britishers are Coming Home), have delayed the necessary supplement on Wimbledon coverage (but see, of course, Viola's post on Wimbledon).

Andy Murray

If the TV coverage is anything to go by, Americans appear to like tennis more than football, but only a little more. I am quite surprised about this since I had expected the USA's success in tennis, and its many famous stars, to generate some real enthusiasm for the sport. Now it may be that my perception here is a little warped because we are talking Wimbledon. Perhaps the US Open will get much more coverage and publicity when that comes around. In the UK, we get obsessed with tennis for a fortnight every year, the Wimbledon fortnight, and the rest of the year we don't care. Maybe it's the same here when it comes to the US Open. Anyway, in the mean time, one can watch Wimbledon on telly without too much trouble. Here in North Carolina, one of the networked channels, NBC, shows Wimbledon live every morning until 1 pm (6 pm in England), and then coverage continues on ESPN2, which is one of the sports channels available on cable. The commentary, analysis and interviews are pretty good and there is a full American presence at Wimbledon, not the skeleton presence ABC Sports and ESPN have in Germany for the World Cup. The only annoyance is that the NBC coverage, which is supposed to be available in widescreen High Definition, is not, at least here.

Inevitably, we want to supplement the American coverage with some British perspectives from the good old Beeb, and with Wimbledon it turns out that this is particularly straightforward. All of the FiveLive Wimbledon coverage is available to international users on-line, though if you try to listen to the commentary while watching NBC or ESPN, the radio commentary is about 5 seconds behind the pictures (the opposite of the cricket problem, where the Willow TV pictures are behind the TMS coverage). This came in handy when the American TV coverage were not showing Andy Murray. FiveLive also has a Live Webcast, which is fun but I have not yet found a way to get the picture in broadband quality. On the other hand, the BBC Sports Player (follow that link to get the Broadband version) has an excellent news, clips and highlights service -- strongly recommended.

[Post repaired 30 June 2008]