The Men's Singles Final, BBC One

It’s taken many years. Most thought they’d never see the day dawn. But this afternoon, the planets were in alignment, the winds were blowing in the right direction, and the obdurate muscle-clad star of many an epic with a face hewn from Scottish granite, famed around the globe for keeping its array of expressions to the barest minimum, was seen to crack into a series of girly gigawatt smiles.

But enough about Gerard Butler, whom the BBC’s cameras sought out with gruelling regularity as a compatriot of his was sweating bullets out on the grass. The men’s singles final at Wimbledon always produces opportunities for a round of celebrities-by-numbers. As the match between Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic came to the boil it was as if the editor in his mobile gantry was channel-hopping between a family drama, a political saga and a Hollywood blockbuster: a pentangular courtside loop migrated between the mother, the girlfriend, the Prime Minister, the First Minister of Scotland and the pair of big-screen A-listers sitting together in blue suits like Tweedeldum and Tweedledee. Mercifully there was a moratorium on cutaways to James Corden cheerleading in slo-mo. And they kept away from the footballers and their wives.

By the end of a shattering first set no one felt the way you do at the start of the second act of Hamlet

Sport is used to purloining language more often found at addresses such as this one. Drama. Performance. Artistry. Wherever history in the making is concerned, they are imparted with the slightly cringe-making top-spin of hyperbole. “Two Men. One Goal. The Final.” So opened the BBC’s coverage. The verbless incitement to hysteria went up to 11 by quoting the soundtrack to Inception, not only in the intro but even between sets. The message: to get to the Hollywood ending, it would be necessary to live the dream within the dream inside the dream lurking beyond the dream. A sort of Russian doll of fantasy sporting outcomes.

After the grand opera of Djokovic vs Del Potro, the pundits were all predicting a climactic drama playing out over five sets. It was by no means off-topic to discern in these visualisations the Shakespearean structure of five acts. But by the end of a shattering first set no one felt the way you do at the start of the second act of Hamlet, inducted into the proceedings and primed for more. Players habitually talk of tough matches; strip that adjective out of their lexicon and you’d lose half the fortnight’s audio content. But this really was tough. Like the best art, it kind of hurt just to be in the audience. “Imagine playing it,” said Andy Murray of the gruelling endgame.

Come rain and shine and lumbering giants tumbling onto the grass and out of the reckoning, the BBC’s coverage has flowed as it always does. This year was different only in the result of the men’s final. Boris Becker, who seems to have little of import to say until the going gets (you've guessed it) tough, slowly morphed into a music-hall wag. “It was necessary,” he ventured of one defiant Djokovic diving volley. “It wasn’t just to get on the highlights tonight.”

Those highlights will be playing for years to come, so you better get used to them. The credits rolled on BBC One’s coverage of the fortnight to the tune of Jamie Cullum singing “Pure Imagination”, citing Tinseltown citing Roald Dahl. “You couldn’t write a better Hollywood story,” adjudged Becker. Tennis movies usually suck. But if they do make Murray: The Movie, may it be titled after a suggestion on a tennis/arts thread on Facebook. Who's Afraid of Virginia Wade?

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