Anyone for tennis – on film?

With Wimbledon fortnight upon us, what better time to explore tennis on the silver screen? Even more fortuitous is that Aidan Turner’s raunchy Amazon Prime series Fifteen Love will debut this summer, in which the Poldark star plays a tennis coach with a chequered past. Turner also features as moustachioed TV presenter Declan O’Hara (shades of Des Lynam as was) in Disney+’s upcoming adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals, a show apparently so steamy it needed two intimacy coaches.

As an aspirational, largely middle-class game, tennis when depicted in the movies is largely free of the pile-ons, punch-ups and bad language of...