A campaign to get more people playing table tennis in Birmingham has got under way, writes Jon Perks.

The Duchess of Cornwall has been photographed doing it. So has Andy Murray. Bart and Lisa Simpson have done it together, while David Cameron and Barack Obama happily did it in front of the cameras.

They’ve all played table tennis, or ping pong as most people know it.

There can be few of us who, at some point in our life, have not had the pleasure of knocking a small, hollow, celluloid ball over a net with a stippled rubber bat. Table tennis is one of those sports that everyone has played – be it in their garage, youth club or at a caravan park on holiday.

And yet compared to the likes of football, rugby, golf, cricket and its big brother, tennis, ping pong doesn’t enjoy anywhere near the same levels of participants, press coverage and profile here in the UK.

According to Sport England’s latest Active People Survey (APS), adult once-a-week participation is 114,800, up from 75,600 in 2007-08, but still with plenty of room for improvement.

As with many sports, the Brits invented ping pong (in the 1880s) but we’ve since been overtaken by the likes of Germany, Japan, Sweden and China, who now dominate the game – understandably when it’s the national sport in a country of 1.3 billion people.

The Brits are hitting back, however, with Ping!, a new fun initiative to get more people playing.

After the success of Ping! in London last year, which saw 50,000 people pick up a bat and play, Sport England has commissioned organisers Sing London (whose core work is with community choirs) to repeat the scheme here in Birmingham and in Hull.

Ping! Brum, which is part of a national scheme supported by £162,676 of National Lottery money from Sport England, sees 55 ‘turn up and play’ tables (complete with bats and balls) dotted around the city, where the public can play for free.

At the end of the event, the tables will be donated to local community groups.

There is also a programme of events including quizzes, masterclasses, bat making sessions and a tournament to find Brum’s best ping pong player.

For the scheme’s duration (until August 8), there is also a Ping Pong Parlour in a previously empty shop unit on Corporation Street.

Curated by the Fierce! Festival team, it is home to a handful of tables and will also stage its own unique events over the coming weeks.

“Our main role is getting people involved in sport, and this is one of the ways we’re trying,” says Anne Rippon, Sport England’s Strategic Lead for the Midlands, speaking at last week’s launch in Victoria Square.

‘‘Table tennis is easy to set up, so you can transport it around quite easily; in France they have concrete tables in their local parks, so we’ve kind of recreated that here – tables outside the library, in the town square, down at the station...

“You can’t pressurise people; they might come and play and that’s all they ever do, but on the other hand they might like to carry on somewhere else, and this is all about telling people where their local club is.”

Also at the launch was table tennis pro Danny Reed, ranked 4 in England and 279 in the world.