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Darts on the Wireless!

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

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