When Netflix announced they were making a documentary series about tennis, similar to their work focused on Formula One in Drive to Survive, I was intrigued. I didn’t watch the motorsport one, having spent too much of my time already watching that sport, but people seemed to think it did a good job telling the stories behind the races, and even non-F1 fans were raving about it. Imagine if they could do the same thing for tennis!

Tennis tournaments quite often gather their sports stars together to do small promotional stunts to promote the event. You know the kind of thing, holding koala bears in Australia, or visiting the Great Wall in China. The Rogers Cup in Canada has a different take on this - getting a selection of WTA players to try and guess which of four cups is proper maple syrup. This seems like a totally unfair challenge, partly because actual Canadians are taking part who must have an advantage, and also because they’ve got honey as one of the options and honey and maple syrup are pretty similar.

What a weekend of sport that was! I’ll admit my focus was pretty much exclusively on Wimbledon, but it was hard to miss the fact we were doing well in the cricket, and there were a handful of motorsport events to also catch the eye. But the tennis held me in thrall for the full weekend. I’m not a huge fan of the men’s game anymore, it’s too whippy and too long, but I couldn’t help getting invested in the Federer/Djokovic rematch.

Feeling a little the worse for wear from our weekend at two music concerts, we decided the ideal remedy was to head to the Edgbaston Priory Club for a spot of tennis. It’s the second year in a row we’ve attended the event, and was just as good this time round. There’s a nice relaxed feeling at Edgbaston, in fact when you walk in it feels more like a summer fete, with lots of kids with racquets running around and the smells of barbecue wafting in the air.

A couple of weeks ago, BTSport’s tennis coverage switched to the latest rounds of the Fed Cup - the self-styled World Cup of tennis wherein players team up according to their country and battle it out to win the tournament and be best across the globe. The British team were playing on British soil for the first time in several years, and were doing pretty well, so it was some constant and slightly one-sided broadcasts that we watched but even so, it was brilliant!

One of the things that brightens an otherwise dull January is the return of tennis. Things in tennis-land go quiet in December, once the finals are all complete and players are taking a well-deserved rest. But the WTA swings back into action in January, and we are already saturated with coverage. Brisbane, Auckland, Shenzhen and some bonus Hopman Cup were all available on our screens this past week. With a year of the ups and downs of the tennis rollercoaster ahead, here are five things I’m looking forward to:

For the past two weeks, the 2017 Wimbledon Championships have been underway, and they’ve provided lots of ups and downs, highlights and disappointments, the usual Grand Slam tournament soap opera. This year was different for me, though, because I was there on day one. I was one of those attendees in the grounds of the All-England Club. I never really thought I’d get to Wimbledon in person. It was a vague desire, but the complexity of getting tickets alongside the fact that coverage at home only ever gets more comprehensive and engaging meant I thought I’d be an armchair fan for the foreseeable future.

Usually when I watch sports, I am looking for a good game/match/race, and may have a favourite in the mix but as long as it’s a good battle or an impressive display, then I’m happy. Over the last six months or so, I’ve been investing myself into the WTA tournaments so that now I have a handful of favourites, for a variety of different reasons. Somehow, I’ve escaped without any of them meeting each other when it really matters, but now, on the second Tuesday of Wimbledon, the inevitable has happened.

We are rapidly heading towards the point of the year where Wimbledon takes over UK TV screens. Currently, the WTA and ATP tours are finishing up their stints on the orange clay, with the French Open still to come, but attention has already turned to the highlight of the grass court season (and arguably the entire tennis-related year). This year, there are no less than three women with everything to fight for heading into Wimbledon, and no Serena Williams to dominate, it couldn’t really be a more interesting battle all set to take place under the Centre Court roof.

This looks AMAZING. One of the bonuses of this film is that there’s a documentary about this subject too, which is on my documentary to-watch list that never gets looked at. If they could just go ahead and dramatise all of them, I’d be able to cross a lot more off that list!