How Tennis Invented Everything

Christian Howgill brings How Tennis Invented Everything to Mills Bakery at Royal William Yard on Saturday 26 September, from 17:00 to 18:00. He's a tennis historian and satirist who's spent more than twenty years in the tennis world, including a stint as Editor of The Queen's Club Magazine. He's written for Jasper Carrott's Carrott Confidential, Rory Bremner's And Now Something Else and Clive Anderson's Talks Back, and for BBC Radio 4's Weekending, Two Cheers and The News Huddlines, and was a regular satirist on Punch Magazine's Sideswipes column. The talk takes its name from his book, which gathers more than a hundred short stories about the game's surprising influence on the world.

Howgill describes the show as raw entertainment rather than a history lesson, so it's less of a lecture and more of a collection of the odd, overlooked connections tennis has with the rest of our lives. The book itself has a fair bit of pedigree behind it: it was inducted into the AELTC's library and museum complex for solving the five-hundred-year-old puzzle of why tennis is scored in fifteen-point increments, it's been spotted in Buckingham Palace and No 10 Downing Street, and it was inducted into The Tennis Hall of Fame. The talk draws on that same material, so you'll get a good run of those smaller, stranger stories that usually get lost in the big match reports.

It's free to attend, though you'll need to book your place in advance. The session runs from 17:00 to 18:00 at Mills Bakery, part of Royal William Yard in Plymouth, PL1 3RP.