Armchair Nation (44 page)

But the colour TV studio lights were a major technical obstacle to broadcasting the long game. The light glared off the balls and the heat was such that players lost pounds in weight and the Formica on the cushion rails burned their hands. During the 1976 world championship finals it became so hot that the players threatened to strike. But Nick Hunter, producing the championship for the BBC, could see on screen the reddened ends of Alex Higgins's fingers, bitten down through nerves, and was convinced that, if they could just sort out the lighting, snooker could provide a source of slowly absorbing psychological drama. Over the next two years, the BBC perfected a glare-free, shadowless canopy of lights that also reduced the heat on the table.
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The BBC began full daily coverage of the world championship in 1978. A little rectangular patch of baize at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield held viewers' concentration for the next two weeks as two bow-tied duellists pushed twenty-two balls around it with long, tapered sticks. ‘It could be a subversive experiment in mass hypnosis: millions of Britons transfixed before the shifting dots like rabbits facing a swaying weasel,' reflected Peter Fiddick. In 1979, viewers followed the dazzling progress of Terry Griffiths, a former postman from Llanelli who had learned to play during a postal strike, as he won the championship at his first attempt. The next year, the world championship competed for airtime with a six-day siege of the Iranian Embassy in London, with the climax of one interrupting that of the other. At 7.23 p.m. on 5 May, the novelist Frederick Forsyth was watching the final on BBC1 as it built to a suspenseful climax. ‘Cliff Thor-burn and Hurricane Higgins were tied at 17 frames each; the world
crown hung on the 35th frame,' he wrote. ‘Then the screen blanked and turned to a blizzard of white dots that eventually dissolved into a street scene. The language in my own sitting room went as blue as the sky outside.'
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Brian Wenham, the BBC2 controller, was a snooker fan and happily used it as an audience builder for the channel's more highbrow programmes. Wenham also gave generous time in his channel's schedules to his other great loves, classical music and opera, and perhaps snooker was not dissimilar: its pleasures were also incremental and demanded commitment from the viewer in order to overcome the dull or ponderous moments. Snooker filled up television's twilight hours, in the daytime and late into the night, when the game, interrupted only by the presenter David Vine's deep Devonian voice and the hushed, sparse commentary of ‘whispering' Ted Lowe, had a sepulchral stillness.

Lowe had acquired his whisper at Leicester Square Hall in the early days of TV snooker in the 1950s, when he sat with the commentator Raymond Glendenning in the crowd, giving him expert tips not meant to be picked up by the microphone. By the 1980s, Lowe tended to speak less, on the assumption that viewers did not need to have the game explained so much. Once he collapsed during a match between Cliff Thorburn and Doug Mountjoy and was carried off on a stretcher while the reserve commentator Jack Karnehm was called, eight minutes of play passing without comment.
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There were no complaints from viewers, so used were they to long stretches of silence, interspersed only with the metronomic scoring of the referee, occasional throat clearing from the audience and the sound of baked resin balls clacking against each other and plopping into holes.

Snooker was unhurried, unedited television. Whole minutes passed unproductively as players examined the balls from various angles, prepared to take a shot and thought better of it, instead furrowing their brows or scratching their cheeks. Jeremy Isaacs, head of Channel 4, believed the dyed green of the baize aided the sport's late-night popularity, because it was soothing to look at, with the balls travelling in neat parallel lines as they bounced off cushions. The smartly blazered referee would occasionally caress the balls with
his white-gloved hands like a butler polishing the family silver. It was a case study in the fundamental meaninglessness of television and how it could draw people into a spectacle whose significance was entirely symbolic and circular, as futile as all sport ultimately is. ‘The familiar ritual is as restful as watching waves break,' wrote the author Gordon Burn, ‘and, miraculously, it is a tranquillity that can be piped, Mogadon in the ether, into the country's living rooms.'
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As players took it in turns at the table, the tiniest accidental glances or the mere friction of the baize could hand a match to an opponent. ‘There is something fascinating about the game: the absolute precision required,' wrote George Mackay Brown in his council flat in Stromness, Orkney, where he had recently thrown out his ‘Stone Age TV' and installed a colour set. ‘The slight subtle touch of ball on ball; the wild foray that sets them in a scatter, helter-skelter, all over the green baize table. The moving colours themselves fascinate the eye … It is exciting and soothing at the same time.' The author A. S. Byatt, who had loathed the group passions and intimate contact of competitive sport since her schooldays, became entranced by the beautiful geometry of snooker with its ‘lines of force playing across a clear green screen, human dramas which were part of the lines of force, the suffering and exulting faces briefly picked out by the cameras'.
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Like the TV wrestlers whom they had replaced in the nation's imaginings, snooker players had nicknames – Cliff ‘the Grinder' Thorburn, Alex ‘Hurricane' Higgins, ‘Steady' Eddie Charlton, Jimmy ‘Whirlwind' White – that conveyed their personalities in vivid shorthand. And there was something courtly and chivalrous about the way they would celebrate an opponent's 147 break or own up to a foul shot even if no one else had noticed. Clive James, a fan since the first series of
Pot Black
, thought that unlike other sports, in which gamesmanship was now routine, snooker confirmed Ludwig Wittgenstein's dictum that a game consisted of the rules by which it is played. Snooker, James reflected, was in essence ‘two young men in black tie who would rather die than cheat'.
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In 1978, there were thirty-five hours of snooker on television; by 1985, 130 hours were given over just to the world championship in the
spring, and there were seven or eight other major snooker tournaments a year on TV. But the 1985 World Championship turned out to be a dull tournament with few close games. The final, between Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor, looked like a mismatch from the start, although it did offer an intriguing personality clash. Davis, the reigning world champion, was known for his coolness and estuarine monotone, earning him the nickname ‘the Romford Robot', with a certain alliterative licence since he was actually from Plumstead. His unremitting safety play, careful cue action and winning habit aroused little sympathy, which caused exasperation among those who saw it as a symptom of national defeatism. ‘[Davis] behaves as the British must behave if they are to maintain any position in the world,' wrote Brian Walden in the
Evening Standard
. ‘Order, method, discipline, plus a stern control of eccentricity, is the passport to triumph in the modern world … [But] the marvellously proficient Davis is clapped with some reluctance. Does this not prove what an essentially frivolous people we are?'
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Taylor was from Coalisland, a poor Catholic town in Tyrone and scene of the first civil rights march in 1968. Never world champion and now being eclipsed by younger players, Taylor also had specially designed, upside down glasses with enormous lenses, worn high on his face so he could look through the most optically exact part of the lens. Even in a decade in which outsized spectacles were fashionable, they made him look, according to ‘Steady' Eddie Charlton, ‘like Mickey Mouse with a welding shield on'.
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At 7.17 p.m. on the Saturday night of the final, Davis won the first frame of the evening session to take an 8–0 lead. ‘Taylor looks three inches shorter,' said the commentator Clive Everton ruefully in the interval. ‘His head sunk into his neck. Even if he gets a chance now, he won't be able to take it.' Viewers deserted the game in their droves, turning over to watch
The Price is Right
or
The Kenny Everett Television Show
. Then Taylor began winning games and viewers slowly returned as they heard the score was narrowing. By the end of the first day, Taylor had pegged Davis back to 7–9. At 11.15 on the Sunday night, he drew level with Davis for the first time, tying the frames at 17–17 to take the match into a final frame. Some viewers
had switched on to BBC2 to see
Bleak House
and had carried on watching even though they had been told this was now postponed. After thirty minutes of edgy play, the score was 62–44 to Davis with four balls left on the table and Taylor needing all of them. He potted a tricky brown, blue and pink to ensure that a sport made for colour TV would enjoy its most mesmerising moment with two balls coloured black and white.

After a series of kamikaze attempts to pot the black, Taylor left Davis a fairly easy cut into the top pocket from close range. When Davis overcut it, Ted Lowe let out an astonished ‘No!', more like an exhalation of breath than a word. The roar of the audience got louder as the white ball came to rest at the right angle for a half ball pot. This time, stretching a little to avoid using the rest, Taylor sank the black. It was 12.23 a.m., and 18.5 million people were still watching, the largest ever British TV audience after midnight.

In Coalisland, a huge crowd of people spilled out of Girvan's snooker hall, where they had been watching on television. Others poured out of houses, in dressing gowns and with children on their shoulders, and paraded around the town, or drove round the town square, sounding their horns. A few weeks later, a tiny, crumpled letter arrived at Taylor's father's house in Coalisland, from the Maze prison, after being scrunched up and smuggled out in someone's tooth: ‘Dennis O chara, on behalf of all the republican POWs I'd like to thank you for scaring the life out off us!!? … Some of the screws were not amused at you winning, and on Saturday they were like the cats who got the cream. However you fixed their wagons for them and at about 12.30 a.m. Monday morning there was a terrible din + banging round this camp as the lads got on to the doors, hammering to acknowledge your
fantastic
victory.
Maith thu a chara
[well done, my friend], it's a while since we've had an opportunity to “Bang” in such good news.' Later that year, October devotions in the Church of the Holy Trinity were specially rescheduled so Coalisland's Catholics could watch Taylor on
This is Your Life
.
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Snooker's slow decline as a televisual sport was as capricious and mysterious as its rise. After the black ball final, it never again
captivated viewers in quite the same way. By watching the techniques of the game's best players on television, talented young players like Stephen Hendry, John Parrott and Alan McManus assimilated tactical lessons that once took a lifetime to learn. As these young players came through, frame times dropped dramatically. Counter-intuitively, this seemed to make the game less exciting. For, like Test cricket, the excitement of snooker had to be earned through the possibility of boredom and the sense that players might, when faced with the simple task of knocking balls into pockets on a flat, unchanging table, be gradually reduced to their last reserves of skill and nerve.

In the spring of 1985, the BBC launched its ‘Domesday Project' to mark the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book the following year. That summer, about 1 million people started work as surveyors, many of them children taken from 9,000 schools. The project divided the whole of Britain into 23,000 4 × 3 km areas called Domesday Squares or ‘D-Blocks' in which the volunteer surveyors wrote about their local area and about their daily lives, the information being recorded on the BBC's own successful brand of microcomputer. The author of the teachers' guide for the project, Professor Ted Wragg of Exeter University, pointed out that schoolchildren had contributed to this sort of data gathering before, helping to sort the seeds that Darwin had brought back from his voyage in the Beagle, and working on the geographer Dudley Stamp's land use survey of the 1930s.
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Despite these high-minded precedents, a great number of the children in the Domesday Project simply wrote about watching TV. It was clear that, despite the arrival of the first, primitive computer games and the new presence of a video rental shop on every high street, children were still mostly captive customers watching what was put in front of them, from prosaic sitcoms like
Terry and June
and
Don't Wait Up
, to high-gloss soaps like
Dallas
and
Dynasty
. The Domesday entries, written by anonymous contributors asked to record what they
thought would interest people reading in another thousand years, read as though written for a passing Venusian. ‘A television is like a box run on electricity and when you switch it on you can watch films and sport and lots of other things,' said one young viewer. ‘Television is one of the main entertainments in the Penistone area,' said another. ‘To some people it has become a third parent, they become addicted to it.'
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