My great-aunt was an avid watcher of late night snooker well into her 90s and was always able to give the form on her favourites – the then-youngsters Stephen Hendry and Ronnie O’Sullivan. But I hadn’t watched a match since the ‘Pot Black’ days of the 1970s and 80s, when Denis Taylor sported huge spectacles, bigger even than Deirdre Barlow in Coronation Street; Steve Davis was dubbed ‘Interesting’ by satirical show ‘Spitting Image’, despite being anything but; and Terry Griffiths meandered aimlessly around the table, running his fingers through his enviable strawberry blonde locks. Those three stars of the green baize – plus Tony Meo – also provided the backing vocals to that memorable (or maybe not) 1986 Chas and Dave hit ‘Snooker Loopy’. I’m sure we can all remember the refrain, if we try really, really hard.
These days, at the World Snooker Championships at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, Denis (who now, curiously, spells his name with two n’s and perhaps still sports giant glasses), Terry (who may well be bald) and Steve (still not interesting) are commentators for the game on the Beeb. Dennis and Terry remain off-screen while Steve does his chatting up front, with fellow professional John Parrott. I tuned in for the second round and amazed myself by sticking out the whole two hour Sunday afternoon session. I didn’t drop off once. In fact, I got a vicarious thrill when I switched on and learned that a record was about to be broken in the match between Scotland’s Stephen ‘On Fire’ Maguire, a 28-year-old from Glasgow, and Mark ‘The Romford Battler’ King.
Unfortunately, the record I was about to see get smashed was for the frame which lasted longest. Previously held by Scot Graeme ‘Pot the Lot’ Dott (playing on the other table this afternoon) and Peter ‘The Force’ Ebdon and coming in at a staggering 74 minutes 8 seconds, this frame was set to exceed that marathon. Basically because no-one was able to pot any of the balls. They kept missing. And so it went on…and on and on. ‘A few in the crowd have fallen asleep,’ noted Terry Griffiths. And I don’t think he was joking. By now there were only six balls on the table – but they weren’t in a hurry to go anywhere, so intent they were on enjoying their moment in the limelight.
‘The last pot was 15 minutes ago,’ commented Dennis with two n’s. ‘Is this a sign of skill or extreme hopelessness?’ I favoured the latter. Suddenly Terry, who had been pontificating on the need to bring out tea, sandwiches and hot water bottles, got marginally more excited. ‘We are going to have a pot,’ he predicted, sagely. ‘He’s going for the green’. Even I could have hit that green so it was no surprise that this professional snooker player managed to do so. ‘But he’s made a mess of the safety shot,’ Dennis added. I groaned. Was this frame ever going to be over? Couldn’t things, well, just go a little quicker? Terry went into mind-reader mode. ‘He’s thinking about flicking the blue along the cushion,’ he observed. Was he? Who knows?
‘The Romford Battler’, whose shiny, bald pate so magnificently reflected the Crucible’s overhead lights, made ‘the best shot of the match so far’ and then ‘missed the pink’. ‘This is now the longest frame ever played at the Crucible since the championships started here in 1977,’ Dennis chipped in. Suddenly, at 75 minutes, it was over. Maguire had made the match all square. The cameras switched to John and Steve. ‘If you’re going to have a frame like that there may as well be some purpose to it,’ said John, of the new record. Would there be dancing in the aisles at the Crucible, I wondered. Then the camera panned around the soporific audience. I thought it unlikely.
I felt inhibited watching the match on an average-sized 28" TV, where the screen was completely filled by the table, an odd glimpse of a foot in the top left hand corner and the occasional profile of referee Pete Williamson, bearing a startling and frightening resemblance to Donald Pleasance in one of his creepier film roles, being the only respite from an unremitting scene of green. Of course, the snooker players hove in view, all black shirts and bow ties (except Maguire, who has a doctor’s note saying he can’t wear one because he gets a rash). But I was expecting to be rewarded with some shots of pert haunches – obviously restricted to viewers who have invested in something considerably larger than my modest set.
The next frame, mercifully, was done and dusted in 17 minutes. Things were clearly hotting up. There were a few more of my favourite camera angles – I had taken to enjoying the hole’s-eye-view of the ball careering towards it. Then it was back to the commentators and Steve Davis’s view that Mark King is ‘a very clinical break-builder’ who ‘wears his heart on his sleeve’, while John Parrott chimed in that Stephen Maguire can be ‘very aggressive in among the balls’. ‘If you leave him in the balls then he is going to clear up,’ he asserted. Then, suddenly, instead of whetting our appetite further for potential clinical aggression among the balls, the talking heads were singing the praises of Sheffield’s tram system. ‘I got one last year,’ Terry informed us. Fascinating.
On the other table, Larkhall boy Graeme Dott was up against Mark ‘The Jester from Leicester’ Selby. Poor old Graeme – a former world champion – was not being touted for success, having broken his arm earlier this year. I thought he had also cut his little chin, shaving, as he sported a plaster right on the dimple. However, I was soon informed that this was there to stop the cue rubbing on that sensitive spot. Sweet. Graeme, we learned, ‘is dynamite in the balls’ but Mark was clearly expected to provide the explosives on this occasion.
When exhorted, I resisted pressing the red button so that I could continue watching these matches. Two hours of snooker viewing was about 118 minutes too long. The modern game may have its aficionados but for me it was all over with the demise of ‘Pot Black’, its commentator ‘whispering’ Ted Lowe and that wonderful, but probably apocryphal comment of his, passed on from generation to generation, when, knowing that many viewers at the time would not have a colour telly, he told them: The player…’is going for the yellow ball by the side pocket and, for those in black and white, it’s next to the blue’.
THE
FUTURE
TENSE
What happens next?
I.
A prophetic vision on a Scottish high street
KENNETH ROY
[click here]
II.
Sticks and stones
SHEILA HETHERINGTON
on David Starkey
[click here]
III.
Karzai goes for it
ALAN FISHER
[click here]
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