The UK premiere of Balls, about the 1973 match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King, arrives at a fraught moment for the art form, says the conductor Marin Alsop
Sophie Rashbrook. Friday November 14 2025, 11.30pm GMT, The Times
As BBC bosses rub their hands with glee at winning more than 11 million viewers for The Celebrity Traitors finale, the Philharmonia Orchestra is turning its attention to a single televised event that, in 1973, attracted an estimated audience of 90 million, a figure for which any modern-day network would commit murder. The event was the Battle of the Sexes tennis match between the women’s No 1, Billie Jean King, and the former men’s champion Bobby Riggs, which played out to a 30,000-strong crowd at the Houston Astrodome.
The match was the subject of a 2017 film starring Emma Stone and Steve Carell. Now it has been turned into an opera by the Emmy award-winning, Oscar-nominated American composer Laura Karpman. The title? Drum roll, please: Balls.