The 2020 World Snooker Championship should have been on TV last week, but unsurprisingly it has been postponed. So BBC2 have been showing highlights of old matches. Ask anyone who has been around a few years which match they would definitely show, and you will get the answer “the 1985 final”. That final, between Steve Davies and Dennis Taylor, is the stuff of legend.
It was the best of 35 frames. It looked as if it was going to be over quickly, as Steve Davies took the first 8 frames. But then Taylor started coming back, and the match went into its second day. We decided to watch the end game, thinking Davies would probably clean up quite quickly. But then it reached 17 all.
The final frame was agonising, but riveting. It took over an hour, and went on past midnight. It was eventually decided on the black ball, which didn’t go down without a fight. Truly memorable, and there were a lot of bleary-eyed people at work the next day!
BBC2 showed it again at the end of last week. I watched the final frame. Again. I had forgotten the details of the agonising safety play, the foul strokes, the snookers, the missed pots, the green that ended up in a different pocket from where it was aimed. I held my breath during several shots. And then there was that final black, hanging on, with another succession of safety shots and missed pots. Eventually, Steve Davis missed a pot, and the white hit the black on the rebound, leaving a clear shot for Taylor; the look Davies gave the table when he saw what had happened.
In the interview afterward the repeat, we learned that nearly 19m people, nearly one third of the UK population, watched that final frame, after midnight, on BBC2. And we learned how snooker had grown; only 13 years earlier, in 1972, Hurricane Higgins won the championship playing in a cramped workingman’s club. David Attenborough was responsible for this growth, wanting a relatively cheap programme to show off the new colour television service.
One intersting little fact I got from Wikipedia: Taylor had not been in the lead at any point during the game, until he potted that final black to win the championship.
And I suppose that, if not for Covid-19, we might not have seen it again. It’s a funny old world.
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