Mick Jagger: the immortal teenager? As things are, the problem we have is all-pervasive, and goes far beyond Wimbledon fortnight. For our television commentators, everyone they comment about, in whatever field - singing, gymnastics, baking pies - is either "nervous" or "relaxed." That exhausts the possibilities. If someone is nervous, it must be because of "pressure." Sue Barker told Laura Robson that she, Laura, must be nervous, because there was a lot of pressure on her. Indeed there was, to the extent that Laura, obliterated in the first set of her third round match, had to fight her way back into the competition. But surely things would be easier for her if she did not have to spend too much time answering fool questions. Rafael Nadal, eliminated in the first round, made it sharply clear during his post-match interview that he was not inclined to talk rubbish about the reasons: he had simply been outplayed. There was an even worse episode when some dolt in the tweetosphere proposed a match between Serena Williams and Andy Murray. This mad notion was seized on by one of the BBC commentators. Interviewing Serena, he told her that there was talk about a possible match between her and... With typical intelligence and charm she dismissed the idea, but next day, and the day after, it was still being referred to as a possible event. At this rate it will probably even happen, and we will have entered the era in which dimwits with itchy telephones shape the world. But I hate the idea of the BBC helping to bring that about. It makes me nervous. I'm not relaxed. Too much pressure. In the madly watchable spy series The Americans (ITV) everybody is having intimate relations with everybody else. To do this, the men keep their trousers on, even if they are Russians. It's another little dash of unlikelihood to add to the massive incredibility of the first episode, when our two Russian spies kept an enemy alive in the trunk of their car for three days and when they stripped the tape off his mouth he came out fighting, apparently not having needed even to pee. Things have got less silly since but only just. Yet despite the occasional lapse into anachronistically modern dialogue the show does a good job of evoking the Cold War atmosphere. There is all too much truth, alas, to the idea that the Soviets were depressingly good at espionage. The upside was that the Russian spies might well have saved all our lives when Reagan got shot. American hawks thought that America had been attacked and wanted to retaliate. The Kremlin wanted to know whether this threat of nuclear war was real. The Soviet spies in Washington found out that the actual government had no such plans. The show is often close to the truth when it presumes that the two superpowers were nervous about each other: i.e. not relaxed. There is a good factual basis for a plot in which a couple of fetching Russian women spend a lot of time in their lingerie, offering themselves in honey-trap manoeuvres to American men whose trousers, like the Stars and Stripes, will never be lowered. Normally I love Rich Hall's documentaries about his American homeland, but the latest, set in Texas, was a bit flat, although not as much so as its title: You Can Go to Hell, I'm Going to Texas (BBC Four). Hall was good about the oil dynasties but seemed to have no access to them as they are today, when the wives and daughters buy their clothes in Paris. It would have been fun to hear the women talk, but instead we mainly heard from a collection of lazy looking men who had all the same opinions as Hall but had them slower. Boy, were they relaxed. I, however, got nervous when Hall floated the notion that the oil barons might have had something to do with JFK's death. Not that Hall came right out and said it. He used phrases such as "According to some people..." Thus he strayed into the dangerous area of stories that are too good to be undermined by mere facts. He was on safer ground watching a punter facing, and failing, the 72oz Steak Challenge.