By all means, do let’s talk about it

In a slight deviation from its ‘all-white’ rule, Wimbledon has allowed female players to wear coloured shorts under their skirts.

Even a traditionalist like me doesn’t mind. A little spot of colour doesn’t offend my sensibilities in any way.

That, however, doesn’t mean my sensibilities are impervious to offences of any kind. Gross affronts to taste and propriety still make me wince, as does vulgarity of any kind.

(To pre-empt my friends’ sneering and invoking teapots and kettles: I don’t necessarily consider swearing to be vulgar. It only becomes that when used in wrong places and at wrong times.)

And when Sky presenter Anna Jones and sports reporter Jacquie Beltrao discussed that Wimbledon innovation this morning, my sensibilities took a savage beating.

The ladies explained, in that chatty yet serious way TV hacks always assume whether or not it’s appropriate, that Wimbledon officials weren’t driven by aesthetic considerations. Nor was it a conscious decision to modernise the old fuddy-duddy codes.

The problem was that white knickers can get visibly stained when a woman player has her period. Apparently, tampons don’t always provide a perfect seal and some unfortunate leakage can occur. (Ideally, I’d suggest a girl should make gravity work for her by playing on her head, but that way she wouldn’t get to the ball fast enough.)

The victim of that malfunction would then have to rush to the lavatory, but the number of times a player can do so during a best-of-three match is limited to one. Should a different need arise later, the woman would have to grin and bear it – or else do a Paula Radcliffe (I’ll spare you the details).

Now those who know me well will confirm that my standards of what is and what isn’t fit for public airing aren’t unduly stringent. But at that point I winced: Jones and Beltrao were really telling me more than I wanted to know.

Yet they didn’t stop there. What followed was a series of interviews with some top players who all hailed the code change. One after another, in the same matter-of-fact tone they’d use to discuss their warm-up techniques, they were saying things like: “I had my period during last year’s Wimbledon, and it was [“embarrassing”, “uncomfortable”, “cramping my style”, take your pick].

As far back as 1965 Kenneth Tynan became the first to say “fuck’ on British TV. That widened the boundaries of the allowable in one fell swoop, and they have been pushed further apart since then.

However, it may be only me, but I don’t mind hearing obscenities as much as I mind graphic, technical discussions of matters gynaecological, physiological, excremental, urinary, prostatic and so forth. I could just about tolerate them when they come from a doctor offering public-service advice, though even that could be delivered more discreetly through less public media.

But when TV presenters evoke vivid images of tennis players leaving blood trails on the Wimbledon grass, I see that as gratuitous vulgarity, a forehand slap in the face of decency and propriety. What makes it even worse, especially in the British context, is that such logorrhoea is part of a general trend.

Britons, especially middle-class ones or higher, have traditionally been known for their reserve and reticence. In my wife’s family, for example, certain subjects always were off limits even among adults, never mind children.

Even now Penelope, who has lived her life in the blasé circles of musicians, artists and writers, won’t allow one of the latter, namely me, to broach some topics, especially in a language she never heard from her parents.

She succeeds at home, but outside she is spitting against the wind (it has taken Penelope years to make me say ‘spitting’ in that expression). Britons have been brainwashed to think that reticence is a sign of a psychological disorder.

One can only validate one’s mental health by letting it all hang out, sometimes literally. Nothing is off limits, there are no tabooisms left. It’s grown-up and healthy to talk openly and publicly about our sex lives, excretions, VDs, private and intimate matters. Actually, there are no private and intimate matters left – everything has been shifted into the public domain.

It’s fashionable these days to blame all our social ills on Americans, but in this case there is some justification for it. However, Americans have had much experience in that sort of thing, and it comes naturally to them.

I found such openness quite irritating even when I lived there but, you know, when in Rome… and all that.  But when Britons begin to walk and talk like Americans, they sound strained and generally pathetic.

A message to Sky presenters: next time you talk about Wimbledon, stick to backhands and volleys or, if such is your wont, strawberries and cream. Leave menstruation to gynaecologists or perhaps the players’ parents. Talking about it on camera is grating, cringe-making – and vulgar in a particularly un-British way.