“If I’d seen the same thing about golf, I wouldn’t have been interested,” says Smith

You probably haven’t watched a lot of lawn bowls, though if you have ever spent any time on the south coast of England, you can hardly fail to have noticed it. Senior citizens play it with fierce determination. Bowls is not generally thought of as a young man’s sport (although the reigning world champion is only in his 30s).

It is to football what ballroom dancing is to a thrash-metal mosh pit. Every weekend afternoon in summer, thousands of elderly Britons dress up in white flannels, don interesting headgear and set off for a perfect stretch of lawn, not to play cricket, but to roll a large, black, round piece of wood towards a smaller, white, round piece of wood at the other end. Then they all walk down the grass - very carefully, of course, because the lawn is of that kind of turf of whose perfection a British gardener once said: “It’s easy: you just plant some grass seed, then you water, roll and mow it for 300 years” - and they do it back again in the other direction.

A couple of issues ago, Preview featured what we confidently believe to be the first ever movie about curling, a sport which involves doing much the same thing as bowls, only on ice. But curling is a rock ‘n’ roll sport by comparison.

Blackball, the new film from British comedian, writer and director Mel Smith (Bean), is about the hallowed sport of lawn bowls (not bowling: bowling is something that Americans do in noisy sheds). And it is the last sport one would have expected to attract the attention of a film-maker like Smith.

He, however, denies - somewhat disingenuously, it seems to me - that bowls is a comic sport to watch. “If you take a large number of people in the gear that they wear, being the age that they are and the shape that they are, and you put them on a lawn and you happen to find that amusing… well, that’s up to you,” he says.

IN MEL SMITH’S NEW FILM, BLACKBALL, THE HERO IS ‘THE BAD BOY OF LAWN BOWLS’. NICK RODDICK ASKS SMITH TO EXPLAIN HOW HE CAN USE THE WORDS ‘BAD BOY’ AND ‘BOWLS’ IN THE SAME SENTENCE.

In point of fact, Smith and his producer, James Gay-Rees have come to have a great deal of respect for bowls and the people who play it since they started work on Blackball. The first part of the shoot, after all, took place in Torquay, at the Kings Bowls Club, where the season had just ended (otherwise they would never have been allowed near the lawn), and where the members were anxious to dispel a few widely held misconceptions about the game.

Like most sports in the age of television, they pointed out, bowls has undergone a major transformation over the past few years. “You watch Sky Sports 3 any night,” says Smith enthusiastically, giving every impression that he has been doing just that every day after shooting has wrapped, “and there’s live bowls from Australia.”

In point of fact, Blackball is not the first film about bowls. There have been a couple of low-budget Aussie ones: a comedy called Greenkeeping (starring comedian Mark Little, who also appears in this one) and the recent sleeper hit Crackerjack. But Blackball is certainly the biggest film to be made so far about the sport, and it has the best cast, too, including Hollywood stars James Cromwell and Vince Vaughn, plus British comedians Paul Kaye (best known to British televiewers as the cringe-making fake interviewer Dennis Pennis) and Johnny Vegas. Rising star Alice Evans (The Abduction Club) rounds out the cast.

The film is based on a real-life event which Smith and writer Tim Firth (whose musical, Our House, based on the music of Madness, recently opened in the West End of London) both discovered on the same day in The Daily Telegraph, which would almost certainly be the paper of choice of most bowls players. The story they read was about the ‘bad boy’ of bowls, a working-class lad from Torquay (the retirement capital of Britain and a positive hot-bed of bowls) called Griff Sanders, who is bowls adviser to the film.