Navratilova: Soviet defector, sporting legend, perfect match

About 10 minutes in to Just Call me Martina (BBC One, Monday) the thing that hits with the force of a centre-court serve is how many fabulous and powerful middle-aged and older women I'm watching on screen.

There’s Martina Navratilova of course, one of the greatest tennis players of all time, but also her tennis friends Pam Shriver, Chris Evert, Billie Jean King, her dentist sister Jana and the documentary’s interviewer, Sue Barker, among others.

The film is an intimate look at the life and current times of Navratilova, so naturally women of this age are out front. But it is a reminder all the same that it’s rare. It’s easy though to make a great film about Navratilova because she is such a fascinating – as well as open and chatty – subject.

With Barker, she travels back to her home town of Revnice in what was Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), from where she defected, alone, to the US aged just 18, and follows her story through her record-breaking career during which she brought a new athleticism to women’s tennis, and her life now as a campaigner and gay activist.

The name of the film, Just Call me Martina, comes from her wedding last year to former Miss USSR Julia Lemigova. As the couple and their two young children zoom away from the reception, with Martina driving, the youngest girl pops her head between the seats and asks, now that that she has married her mom, what should she call her. And that's the answer.

And then Martina and Julia notice the girls are eating sweets which they are not allowed and there’s a row – from Soviet tanks on the streets of Prague in 1968 to strict parenting in a flashy Porsche in New York in 2015, this fascinating documentary covered a lot of ground.