Roger Federer’s 12 final days — the tennis king is curiously mild to the end

Traditionally the middle of summer is a hell zone for television critics. It’s when the schedules crater into sport. In the past you’d struggle to do a couple of paras on Wimbledon, titter at the footballers. But sports personalities are now big telly business, so the problem is the opposite: you have to cut through absolute pulsing acres of hagiography.

We begin, naturally, with Roger Federer. What hasn’t been said about this preternaturally fragrant, gorgeous player? In 2022 he retired, and if you didn’t think anyone could turn this simple, rather pedestrian, one-note event — as it happens, overshadowed by the death of Queen Elizabeth a week earlier — into some tear-stained, soaring, sub-Spielberg narrative, or at least attempt to, well, you haven’t watched Federer: