Object of the week: An unscreened TV interview with 1960s women’s tennis champion Ann Jones
In the late 1960s, broadcaster Bernard Braden conducted in-depth interviews with many luminaries of the era, but the series was never aired. In this footage, the British number one women’s tennis champion at the time talks candidly about changes facing the sport and attitudes to women players.
This illuminating and slightly awkward uncut interview with Ann Jones, then the number one women’s tennis player in Britain, shows attitudes towards women in sport in the 1960s and is one of many interviews from the intriguing Bernard Braden – Now and Then collection, which also includes interviews with such luminaries as Sean Connery, Spike Milligan, Tom Jones, Cilla Black, Vanessa Redgrave and Peter Cook.
Canadian television presenter and journalist Bernard Braden was a familiar figure to British television and radio audiences in the 1950s and 60s, presenting his own BBC radio series in the early 1950s entitled Bedtime with Braden, and later moving from BBC television to ITV with his series On the Braden Beat, which ran from 1962 to 1967. Billed as a consumer programme, Braden’s show also featured comedy sketches and secured Braden’s place as an audience favourite.
Following the end of his ITV series he embarked on an ambitious self-funded TV project called Now and Then, in which he planned to interview a variety of popular and influential figures about their lives and plans for the future and then return to interview them for an update in a few years. As an indication of Braden’s forward-thinking approach to television, the interviews were filmed from 1967 to 1968 on 16mm in colour, even though only BBC2 was broadcasting in colour at this time – BBC1 and ITV would not follow until late 1969.
The series itself did not progress beyond these initial interviews, and they were unseen by the public until 2008 when the Now and Then collection was donated to the BFI National Archive by Braden’s former production associate Gillian Best, who also helped the BFI in making a series for Channel 5 in which extracts of the interviews were finally broadcast.
In this film, Ann Jones speaks confidently about the pressure she feels in playing Wimbledon and how some players enjoy having the support of the crowd, while she finds it adds unwelcome pressure.
As the Wimbledon Tennis Championships of 1967 marked the first regular colour television programme broadcast in Britain, there is some speculation about whether being in colour will change the dress code of the tournament. But Jones is much keener to talk more widely about tennis as a sport, particularly whether or not Wimbledon will move into the Open Era of joint professional and amateur tournaments, and on the disparity in prize money between men and women.
Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.