I have been a regular contributor to the popular BBC television series Grumpy Old Men. For years, one source of my grumpiness has been the state of British tennis. Simply moaning, I have discovered, is not terribly good for you, other than getting you a nice fee for the odd TV appearance. So five years ago I decided to stop moaning and try and do something positive. More about that later.

I wasn’t alone in having a moan about tennis in the UK. Everybody has done it at some point or another. The most common gripe? “How come we don’t produce better players when we’ve got so much money to spend on the game?”

Last year’s outlay by the Lawn Tennis Association was in the region of £49m, while Serbia spent £1m and has three of the top five players in the world. Granted that whoever is at the helm of British tennis has a tough job because of the pressure to produce results quickly but Roger Draper, LTA chief executive, has made some bold statements and there are many who are growing tired of waiting to see results. By his own admission, he began his tenure by concentrating on the “elite” end of the tennis ladder. People like me, and many others, now want to see if the LTA is prepared to put time and resources into ensuring that the bottom rungs of that ladder are in place. That’s where I would have started. I’ve climbed a few ladders in my life and I’m certain I wouldn’t have been able to get to the top if there hadn’t been anywhere to put my feet in the first place.

For some time, the popularly held view has been that if we can produce a champion quickly (and surely that means Andy Murray) it will give us something to build on. Are we forgetting that Greg Rusedski and Tim Henman reached the dizzy heights of No 4 in the world and the number of people playing the game in Britain actually fell? This is because the grassroots have been neglected. Worse than that, tennis is actually unfairly treated.

Five years ago, while in America, I arranged to play tennis with friends in a park. I arrived early and was sitting around waiting when a man approached me and asked if I was looking for a game. I told him I was going to play shortly but he enquired about my standard and organised a game for me while I was waiting. My friends arrived, they all joined in, and we played for hours. There was no cost. I asked my new-found friend: “Why don’t you have to pay to play these courts?”

“We’ve paid our property tax, why would we pay again?” he replied.

When I returned to Britain I went to all the park courts in the London borough of Merton, the borough that includes the All England Club, Wimbledon. An hourly rate was being levied. When I asked where the money went, I discovered it went into the central kitty of the council. It was not ring-fenced for tennis, or even sport. As a council tax payer, this meant that effectively I was paying a tennis tax. I was outraged and formed a charity called tennisforfree with two like-minded individuals, Patrick Hollwey and John Kinder (www.tennisforfree. com).

We went to the LTA and asked them how it could be that they allowed their sport to be unfairly taxed. They seemed to be embarrassed by us, probably because they had been involved in numerous schemes that positively endorsed the charging for court time on park courts.

“Pay and Play” was advertised on their website and was seen as being a good thing. “Could someone please tell us,” we argued, “what sense there is in taxing a sport that keeps you healthy when the government is spending millions trying to get people to exercise?”

I sat in meeting after meeting arguing this case with people who struggled to grasp the concept of what we were saying. “When we are in parks,” I said, “we don’t have to pay to look at the flowers. Kids don’t pay to use the children’s playgrounds. A kickaround on the grass is free. All of these need maintenance - probably less than a bit of Tarmac with a net across it - and yet we have to pay to use tennis courts.”

I had seen kids thrown off a tennis court because their hour was up, only for all the courts to then remain empty. Councils, it seemed, were paying staff to stop people exercising.

Why, I asked, were there only a few of us who wanted to see this reversed? All we wanted was a level playing field, for tennis not to be treated unfairly. We quoted instances when tennis courts with an hourly charge of £5 or more had been removed by councils and replaced by basketball courts or skateboard parks that were free to use, even though neither basketball nor skateboarding have wealthy governing bodies representing them.

So, what have we achieved, five years on? The penny has finally dropped. The new charitable arm of the LTA, the Tennis Foundation, has stated it will not put any money into initiatives that involve charging for court time. Roger Draper told me at a meeting with the sports minister, Gerry Sutcliffe, that he wanted a campaign to highlight the injustice of court charging, and that it would be launched during the Wimbledon fortnight this year. It didn’t happen. I’ve asked Roger why and so far he hasn’t supplied a satisfactory explanation. Maybe we will have to wait another year until the same amount of media attention is focused on tennis again.

We hope a coordinated campaign will be launched but until then we intend to continue with our efforts, and have already set up a website - www.stoptaxingtennis.com - with the intention of getting a million people to sign up to a petition so that we can then take it to 10 Downing Street.

It was a great Wimbledon final, wasn’t it? Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, the two best players in the world, battling it out in a thriller. Thirteen million people watched it on the BBC. How many were enthused by the game and would love to have gone out and played? A lot. Where would they do it? How much would it cost?

And who would show the new players how to hold and swing the racket? British tennis has failed to set in place an infrastructure that can enable people to learn the basics of the game and play it on a regular basis at no cost.

Let’s begin a debate on this. For too long, the millions of pounds available to British tennis have been spent by a small elite who are seemingly only accountable to another small elite who appointed them in the first place.

The public, who generate most of the tennis wealth through their continued love affair with the Wimbledon Championships, are left with little or no say.

I would be interested to learn what they’d make of some new proposals that would benefit each and every one of them, should they wish to take advantage. It’s about time for new balls.

Six-step manifesto to improve tennis at grassroots level

FREE TENNIS
Offer free tennis in parks. Where councils refuse, name and shame them and have central government hold them to account. More than 100 councils have already made their courts free at all times

TEACH THE GAME
One free ‘participatory’ session to take place once a week, all year round, in as many parks as possible, outlining the basics of the game to allcomers on a Saturday or Sunday morning to bring new people into the game

HELPING HANDS
The LTA or the British Tennis Foundation (or both) to employ people to be ‘tennis facilitators’ at the free park courts for a few hours every weekend, overseeing how court time is allocated

TENNIS ACADEMY
One of the sets of free courts in every borough in the country to become a kind of tennis academy. This is where we hire the better coaches who train the kids who have been talent-spotted by the ‘tennis facilitators’. Cost to be covered by sponsors: companies such as Ariel and Barclays, who already pour money into British tennis

JUNIOR RETURNS
Our best junior players receive financial backing from the LTA and train at the fabulous National Tennis Centre at Roehampton. They must give something back. I propose they give some of their time to help promote tennis in British parks by putting on a tennis roadshow. We need to get our good tennis out there in people’s faces

PLAY THE GAME
Each set of free park courts to have one tournament a month, perhaps rotating the age groups through the year. This would be a knockout event - just one tiebreak each, so the whole thing only takes a couple of hours. You would have a prize for the winner - in the region of £100 (again, sponsored by an IBM, Barclays, or Tesco). These tournaments need not be expensive to stage. A good cash prize will get the kids out there trying to win. Do this for a few years and just watch the standard improve

STARS BACK THE INITIATIVE

‘It’s great what the Tennis For Free campaign is doing. Best of all it encourages kids to play tennis and what the sport in any nation needs is plenty of new talent’ Bjorn Borg,

‘I am fully behind anything that allows more youngsters to get on tennis courts and try out the game. After such a great Wimbledon there is currently a buzz about tennis and it would be wrong to allow that to disappear’ Tim Henman

‘There’s no doubt there is a need for free tennis courts in parks in Britain. It’s absolutely crucial and if there are going to be home-grown champions, there need to be more youngsters playing the game’ Pat Cash

‘Anything that gets kids on court and gives them the experience of tennis is an excellent initiative. British tennis needs a combination of diverse backgrounds playing the game’ Greg Rusedski

Tony Hawks is a comedian and author and former Sussex county tennis player (www.tony-hawks.com)