Archive for the ‘Darts’ Category

It is a universal truth that all Pathé newsreel films are charming. One of my favourites is a 1937 clip entitled “Do You Dart?”. It starts as one would expect, with a group of flat-capped men clustered around a dartboard in a pub. The scene that follows, however, takes one by surprise: a fashionable Thirties drawing room, full of slinkily clad women and dapper-looking men, all having a wizard wheeze with the things.

Darts, you see, used to be an upper-middle class parlour game (as well as traditional pub entertainment). Even royalty didn’t think it beneath them; in 1937, the same year as the Pathé clip was broadcast, the king and queen (later the Queen Mother) had a game at a social club in Slough. This prompted the Sunday Chronicle headline: “The queen has made the women of Britain darts-conscious”. Over the two years that followed, darts-playing pubs trebled.

At the beginning of this year, history repeated itself – sort of – when Zara Phillips and Mike Tindall made an appearance at the final of the PDC World Championships at Alexandra Palace. As the Telegraph’s Jim White noted, the main way in which the royalty stood out from the crowd was in their choice of drink. Whereas most tables were populated by hundreds of foam-smeared pint glasses (more than 250,000 pints of lager were consumed by patrons of generous appetites and proportions), the royal table was a forest of champagne flutes.

Zara Phillips is not the first modern royal to attend a major darts tournament. Last year Prince Harry made an appearance, and saw fit to give the 20st winner, Adrian Lewis, a bear hug. Even his elder brother, William, has been known to throw a move or two. Many people are starting to think that this game is migrating upwards.

According to Robert Holmes of the British Darts Organisation, the sport is increasingly popular with “City boys”. The newly formed City of London Darts Association is, he says, “full of them”. There is a Bank of England team and a Stock Exchange team. Furthermore, in this new climate of austerity chic, when traditional, cheap and folksy pursuits are cool, darts nights at home have become a feature of the trendsetters’ circuit. Continue reading on the Telegraph website