Darts on the wireless

Darts fans all over the world marvel at today’s supreme digital technology which brings every detail of the Skol World Championships and other major PDC darts events into your front room and more or less into your lap.  But what of that time pre-TV? Did darts ever feature on the radio? Darts Historian Patrick Chaplin takes a step or three back in time.  

Darts has come a very long way since the first radio broadcast in England of a major darts match - a News of the World - final in the mid-1930s.  

The 1930s was the period of the first darts ‘craze’.  From small beginnings in the 1920s, darts leagues flourished and the popularity of the game spread rapidly from 1930 onwards, even being picked up by the English elite – the upper classes - as a ‘novelty’.  The King and Queen played darts in 1936 and raised the profile of the game even higher.  Darts was played in Mayfair – the very smartest part of London – and invitations to ‘Darts and Dancing’ was a sign that your host was ‘a modern.’

The 1930s was also a time by which all families – rich and poor – had, or had access to, a wireless and would gather around it – rather they had done in previous decades around the piano in the ‘front room’ – to be entertained.

The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) was keen to promote all sports of all kinds and broadcast a darts championship for the first time in 1936. It was the News of the World (London and Home Counties) Final in which Peter Finnigan of the Eight Bells, Tolworth, Surrey, beat Albert White (Weaver’s Arms, Islington, London) by two games to nil. But it didn’t stop there. 

As one journalist wrote:
“The BBC is determined to make us play games of one sort or another. Now they want us to play darts, not merely to listen to a commentary on someone else playing, but they are going to put one man in the studio to play against you!”

Sounds crazy?  Well, the ingenuity of the BBC knew no bounds. The idea was that a ‘local champion’ would bring his own darts and dartboard along to the studio and be introduced ‘over the microphone.’  The listener would also prepare his (or her) darts and dartboard at home.  The ‘champion’ would then throw three darts with a commentator announcing the score.  There was then a pause while the listener threw his (or her) darts and jotted down their score.  A regulation game of 301 was played, the task for the listener being to finish his or her game before the ‘champion’ shot out.  (And no cheating!)

The journalist who had brought this unique programme to the notice of his readers commented, “If you find that you reach points before the champion you can pat yourself on the back and tell the story to the fellows at the office in the morning.”  The journalist then revealed his own ignorance of the game of darts by adding, “By the way, the games start and end on a double.  I have a faint idea what that means, but if you propose to take this seriously you had better look up the rules.”

But after the novelty of darts wore off at the end of the decade the actual incidence of darts on the radio was rare indeed for many years. In fact, it needed the invention of TV and the technical progress of another three decades, and particularly the split-screen technology before the game entered its next ‘boom’ era.

©2001 Patrick Chaplin