Authors: Eric Bristow
‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘I’ve got some spare balls.’
But Dick found it, wiped it clean and said, ‘I want him to sign it later. It’s the only ball I’ve got left with his initials on it.’
Engelbert really was darts mad and invited all the players up to his Vegas gaff for a few drinks. Jamie Harvey was there and Engelbert had a karaoke machine. Jamie has a thing where every time he sees a karaoke he insists on having a sing on it. So he sang for Engelbert and at the end of it said, ‘I bet not many people have sung for you have they, mate?’
I played at Engelbert’s house for two hours in Leicester once and the TV cameras were there to film it. We played and he won one leg. Guess which leg they kept showing on TV. But he was great, very down to earth and would have enjoyed appearing as a celebrity on
Indoor League
.
Eventually
Indoor League
dropped the bar games and concentrated solely on darts as the top players battled it out in Leeds. For people like Nicky Virachkul and Stefan Lord filming always proved to be a big temptation because they loved gambling – if they were in a pub together and spotted two flies they’d bet on which one flew off the wall first – and there was a casino straight across the road from the studio. As soon as they collected their prize money they’d be straight into the casino and a few hours later they’d come out with nothing. It didn’t mean anything to Nicky because he came from a rich family. When he was younger and living in Thailand, he’d always go down town to a certain pub because it had a dart board. His dad said to him, ‘What do you do when you go down town?’ And when Nicky told him he played darts, his dad simply bought him the pub so he could live there and practise whenever he liked. Nicky was into the darts scene in general, rather than just trophy hunting, and his big enjoyment was travelling around the world with us, having a laugh. Money couldn’t buy that.
*
The biggest TV game show connected to darts had to be
Bullseye
, which began its run in 1981 and in its prime was watched by fifteen million viewers on a Sunday evening. Teams of two competed, but one member of each team had to be a non-darts player who answered questions to allow his partner to throw the darts. There was also a charity interlude in which a top player would be invited on to throw nine darts at the board. The aim was to get as high a score as possible which was then converted to pounds and donated to a charity of the player’s choice. If you got a score of 301 or over the money was doubled. That was nerve-racking.
The first time I went on I supported two Welsh lads who got through to the final. They had six darts between them to score 101 or over to win the star prize. The non-darts player stepped up to the oche first and his first dart missed the board completely. His second went in treble twenty and his third landed in double top. That meant his mate needed one with three darts. I think they won a speedboat, which is handy when you live in a high-rise block of flats.
I made about seventeen appearances on
Bullseye
. I loved it, and I hit 301 or over in about six of them. You’d be there for about four hours during filming and in those four hours they’d play the theme tune about thirty times. Afterwards you just couldn’t get it out of your head.
Jim Bowen, the presenter, was great. When he wasn’t
doing
Bullseye
he had a jazz band. He played on the
QE2
when I was doing exhibitions on it with Maureen. Everything was paid for; the whole thing was all-inclusive – except for the bar bill. I was only there for a week’s stint, but on my first trip the bar bill came to £1,800 and the second time I went it was £2,200. I ended up out of pocket. Jim would play with his band until about half past eleven at night then join me at the bar with his wife until three in the morning.
Going on
Bullseye
was worse than appearing in any World Championship. I remember when I first went on, I was wondering what would happen if I had a repeat of my 1980 match where I went bounce out, bounce out, one. It would be utter humiliation. Fortunately I did OK. The best ones were the Christmas shows. In 1983 it was Keith Deller, Jocky Wilson and me as special guests and we all appeared in fancy dress. I was a Pearly King, Jocky was a Scotsman all togged up in full kilt regalia complete with a
sgian-dubh
, which is a small dagger, and Keith was the Milky Bar Kid.
We were all in the green room before filming started when Rod Hull came into the bar. He was the surprise celebrity guest who came on at the end of the show. I wasn’t keen on him; I’d seen what he did with other people. He basically used the puppet to feel up women and stick his hand between people’s legs. It was out of order. We’d all had a drink, perhaps one or two more
than
we should because the Christmas special did attract a kind of party atmosphere. I turned to Jocky and Keith and said: ‘I’m going to sort this out right now.’
I walked up to him and Jocky followed close behind. He always followed me in these sorts of situations. I went straight up Rod Hull’s face, eyeball to eyeball, and said, ‘Now listen, pal. When you come on set later on with that fucking silly bird of yours, if you come anywhere near me with that fucking thing I will knock you out straight, on telly, whether it’s fucking live or not. I will bop you.’
I kept looking him straight in the eyes and he knew I meant it. I added, ‘I will fucking put you down, mate,’ and turned to walk back to my pint.
As I did that Jocky came up to him, pulled his
sgian-dubh
out of his sock, and brandishing it said, ‘Aye, pal, and I’ll fucking kill the bastard bird!’
When Hull came on later on he was pulling Jim Bowen all over the place with his stupid Emu, but he didn’t come anywhere near us; he daren’t. Then the silly sod went and fell off his roof and died some years later. What a plonker. When I heard about it I thought, well it’s a pity that bird can’t fly or it could’ve saved him. I didn’t like Rod Hull. He was a pervert who was getting away with something that wasn’t right. That’s why if he’d touched me inappropriately with his hand I would’ve sparked him. His bottle went when I threatened him. He’d only come down to have a quiet drink
before
the show, but I had to nip it in the bud. I didn’t want another situation developing as happened on Michael Parkinson’s show a few years earlier where he assaulted Michael so much that he fell backwards off his chair. That was well out of order.
Fortunately there was no repeat of this on
Bullseye
and it ended up being a great show. They filmed the Christmas shows in August and it was very strange to see everyone in the audience dressed up all Christmassy. There was Christmas music and at the end we were all lined up waving to the camera and wishing everyone Merry Christmas. Then you stepped out of the studio and outside it was boiling hot. Bizarre! The prizes on the show always used to make me laugh too. They were rubbish: a set of Charles Dickens’s books, a Teasmade, canteens of cutlery and the boats you could win if you got the star prize. What is the point of speedboat if you live in Sheffield or Birmingham? Where’s the nearest water? But the programme makers always offered a cash alternative instead of the prize once the cameras were turned off. Jim Bowen, the presenter, was nervous as hell throughout the filming. He made that many mistakes all you heard was ‘Cut, Cut, Cut’. While I was there he asked one contestant, ‘And what do you do?’
‘I’m unemployed, Jim,’ came the reply.
‘Great, super, lovely,’ Jim said, and then you’d hear laughter from the audience and the producer going ‘Cut, right, let’s start again.’
He may have been a nervous wreck but Jim made
Bullseye
the ratings puller that it was, and he was absolutely devastated when it was axed in 1995. It was still attracting huge viewing figures. Somebody at the top made a big boo boo getting rid of it. It was a working-class tradition: go down the pub on a Sunday, come home, watch
Bullseye
, have a nap, then have your Sunday dinner. What could be better than that? It was also great for up and coming darts players. With upwards of thirty shows a year you couldn’t just have the top players on all the time, so it gave lesser-known ones the chance to put themselves in the limelight – and it was quite a prestigious thing to own a Bronze Bully for the highest nine-darter. No darts player ever refused to go on that show.
They filmed three-a-day and the whole series was filmed over ten days. When the curtain came down on it I felt so sorry for Jim. He said to me shortly afterwards, ‘I can’t understand it, Eric. I told them I only wanted another two or three more years. It was still doing well.’ There were tears in his eyes as he said this. It was like a bereavement to him. Even today the decision to axe it still doesn’t make sense. Jim used to go round all the colleges and universities taking
Bullseye
on tour and there were loads of Jim Bowen Fan Clubs. It had a cult following among students.
If Jim was the face of
Bullseye
, Tony Green was the voice. He was a good darts player in his time. When
I
won my first World Championship in 1980 Tony was a very good Lancashire County player. During those championships we all stayed at the same hotel for about eight days and we’d practise there. Tony loved playing for money. He’d play 1001 for a tenner a game, and one night he took all Jocky’s cash because Jocky saw him as a commentator and had no idea he could play darts as well. Jocky had already had far too much to drink and Tony threw ton, ton, ton, eighty, one-forty.
It made me laugh on
Bullseye
when the finalists came up to the oche to try and hit 101 in six darts and win the star prize, and Tony would be saying to them, ‘Take your time, take your time, don’t rush, nice and easy now, nice and easy.’ I’d be at the side if I was the special guest, watching this and thinking: Tony, will you shut up and let them get on with it? And as they were about to throw you could see him start to lean towards the dart board, almost willing them to hit treble twenty. Then the dart would hit the board, miss twenty, and he would say, ‘That’s five.’ You could almost read the mind of the player thinking: I know it’s a frigging five, pal. Now will you shut up and just let me throw? And then he’d be off again: ‘Take your time, take your time, easy does it, take your time, there’s no rush.’
They brought the programme back on Challenge TV with Dave Spikey as host, but it wasn’t the same. Phil Taylor was one of the guests for the nine-darter and
he
threw a bad score. Dave interviewed him afterwards and Phil said, ‘I threw shit there.’ The producer yelled ‘Cut’ and they refilmed it, allowing him to have his nine darts again. He got a good score second time around. But what was that all about? That’s cheating, in my opinion.
I only did one show. It was only the second one Spikey filmed and he seemed more nervous than Jim. I couldn’t get into it – it just wasn’t as enjoyable. I wanted to see Jim there. He
is
Mr Bullseye.
TV was great because it brought darts into millions of people’s living rooms. With quiz shows like
A Question of Sport
I played to win, just as I would a World Championship darts final. I played with Emlyn Hughes, Bill Beaumont, Willie Carson and Ian Botham, to name but a few. When I was with Botham we’d won it halfway through the show, we were so far in front. We knew all the answers because we were experts on all sorts of sport. I was on there twelve times and won about half of them. I was good on my own sport and very strong on things like snooker, cricket and football. Your worst nightmare on there is to get your own sport question wrong, but I also had an embarrassing moment when trying to spot the mystery sportsman. I was convinced it was Paul Daniels but my team mates were saying to me, ‘It can’t be Paul Daniels, what sport does he do?’
I was having none of it and said, ‘I don’t give a damn what you say, it’s Paul Daniels. I’ll bet you anything you like it’s Paul Daniels.’ I’d met him a couple of days earlier so I was recognising all his features in the little glimpses I was getting. It turned out not be Paul Daniels but Pat Pocock. I felt a right idiot. They even put it on the
Best of
… video for Christmas.
I enjoyed appearing on
A Question of Sport
, but these days it’s got far too skilful. Everyone is swatting up too much before they go on. When they recognise a synchronised swimmer just by their toe it takes the fun out of the game for me. You like to see these sportsmen getting it wrong as much as they get the questions right. The whole idea was to watch sportsmen and women making fools of themselves. If something can make you laugh on telly it’s worth watching, and the programme has just got a bit too technical for me. I like to go straight into these things without any priming and without seeing the questions beforehand.
There was another similar programme called
Sporting Triangles
which ran on rival channel ITV from 1987 until its welcome demise in 1990. It was captained by Jimmy Greaves, Tessa Sanderson and Emlyn Hughes, and was billed as an ITV
Question of Sport
. It was far from it. Whereas
A Question of Sport
worked on a simple points-for-getting-questions-right basis, you needed a degree in logic to work out how to play
Sporting Triangles
. It
was
based on the game Trivial Pursuit and had an electronic board with three teams of two round it. Teams would roll an electronic dice to decide how many squares they moved. They’d then get a question depending on what colour they landed on. There were four colours: three of them represented the teams, in which case they’d get a question on one of that team’s sports. If they landed on white they could get anything. Are you still following this? That’s the simple part. In later series they added other rounds to the game like ‘Who Am I’. There was also a rule that let teams change squares into their own colour if they answered a question on an opponent’s square. It was all utterly, utterly baffling.
I did a few of them and one of the guests was Nigel Mansell. He did one show and got everything wrong. He was useless. It got scrapped shortly afterwards which I was glad about, because it was crap.