The theme of this story is revival.
The settings are varied: a community centre near Glasgow; the funeral for a hero in Kirkcaldy; and a concert hall in Glasgow packed with 10,000 people full of adrenalin (and a few beers). The cast of characters includes a man who is about to become a millionaire, the man who will make him one, and four mates called Bullet, Gambler, the Hulk and Winter Coates. And the subject is the strange, strange game of darts.
You may have noticed what's been happening in the game recently: the massive audiences on television, and at the SSE Hydro in Glasgow. The rise of Gary Anderson, the Scot who became world champion. The new academies for children to learn the game. And a new feeling that this old working man's game is more classless and less dominated by beery men with bellies. This year there's also a film about the game based on a novel by Martin Amis who likes to talk about darts' thrilling milieu. Darts is not what it used to be.
This is what it used to be: a sport that started in pubs and became big on TV in the 1980s but died again, mainly of ridicule. In their comedy show, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones famously took the mickey with a sketch that showed the players going for a triple (a triple vodka) and the image of the sport, already in decline, never quite recovered.
But something is happening now: a revival, led mainly by the extraordinary television coverage on Sky Sports. Take a look. It's slick, fast, and clean and it has the buzz of The X-Factor. The audiences for darts have changed as well: the number of women watching has risen dramatically and the game itself is much faster than it used to be; there's no waiting around while the players swig beer. This is a serious, speedy game: bang, bang, bang.
Just as important are the game's big stars, including the best Scot on the circuit, Gary Anderson. I'm meeting him at the Radisson Hotel in Glasgow and it's a constant competition between me and the fans who want selfies with him. We joke that Anderson confirms some of the stereotypes of the darts player and defies others. He likes a cigarette for example and pokes fun at his beginner's beer belly ("I need to lose a bit of weight," he says, giving his stomach a tap). On the other hand, he does little of the drinking traditionally associated with the game; he has the odd beer now and again but that's it.
This mix of old and new, and his amiable personality, has made Anderson a new kind of champion in a game that has gone through many phases. In the 1930s, it went through a brief period of popularity among the middle and upper classes (even the Queen had a go), but its real heyday was in the 1970s when it became a hit on television. By the end of the decade, millions were watching it on telly and its stars had gone mainstream: Eric Bristow, Jocky Wilson from Kirkcaldy and Bobby George (Bobby Dazzler).
But then the questions started: Was this really a sport, men in garish polyester playing a pub game? Then the jokes. And then television lost interest, and once that happened, the game went into a slump and its leading figures fell out. Many of the top players blamed the British Darts Organisation (BDO) and went off to form their own group, the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC), which launched a new competition. It is this tournament, shown on Sky Sports, which has been at the centre of the revival.
Anderson has been one of its greatest stars. "I can see it getting bigger and bigger and the PDC is pushing it and pushing it," he says. "I don't even think it's peaked yet. We're playing in front of crowds of 11, 12, 13,000 people." Last month, there were crowds easily that big at the SSE Hydro for the Premier League (when Anderson beat Kim Huybrechts) and later this year Anderson will be off round the world. There are so many countries to visit, he has to ask his partner Rachel to check exactly where it is he's going.
This is the sort of casual, relaxed attitude Anderson takes to the game, perhaps because he didn't take it up until he was 24 and for a long time played it while still working in the building trade. Even now, his practice regime is pretty relaxed - a couple of hours here, a couple of hours there - and he still enjoys the odd game in his local pub. Anderson likes this idea of keeping one foot in the pub roots of the game, although he's also perturbed by the fact so many pubs now don't have a darts board.
"If you go to smaller pubs, they'll still have a dartboard," he says, "but go into a lot of the pubs now and it's all food orientated and you won't see boards. I think they've realised food makes more money and you don't make any money out of a dartboard."
Anderson's hope is that landlords will notice the revival that's happening and start putting the dartboards back up, but the lack of them certainly isn't holding the game back. Quite the opposite: the television coverage has taken it to millions of people who've never played darts in their life, in a pub or anywhere else, and the presentation is slicker and faster than the old days.
"The PDC have been driving it every year," says Anderson. "It's being played all over the world, and now the PDC is trying to get everyone together now. But it's still a working man's game - that's still going on: some of the boys going out on a Friday night for a beer and a game of darts."
I meet some of those boys going out on a Friday night for a game of darts at Lilybank Bowling Club in Johnstone in Renfrewshire. In the front room near the bar are the Zumba ladies, but out the back, by the pool table, are four workmates and friends enjoying the darts. They are all aware of the sometimes naff reputation the game has but enjoy playing up to it with lots of banter and beer. They have darts nicknames of course (you've got to have a nickname). So David Leith, 37, is The Bullet and Paul Hogan, 51, is The Hulk. Craig Taft, 34, is The Gambler, but David Coates, 38, has the best one: he is Winter Coates.
This group of friends is a mixture of those who were introduced to the game by their fathers and those who've got into it much more recently, so to that extent they represent where darts is now: an old game attracting many new recruits.
"I grew up with darts and it was my mum who got me into it," says Winter Coates. "She played in the pub and brought home the trophies with all the darts on them so I ended up with a dartboard on my bedroom wall."
Paul (The Hulk) Hogan is a little bit older and has seen the changes in the game since its 1970s heyday. "The game on TV has changed - it used to be that the players would be drinking and smoking," he says. "The game did become a joke and the joke was: that's not a sport."
Hogan remembers one of the biggest stars of that time, Jocky Wilson, but his story did not end well. When the game declined, he retreated to his hometown of Kirkcaldy and later suffered from ill health and died aged 62 in 2012. His funeral was attended by hundreds of family and friends, including his old friend and rival Eric Bristow, but on that day Bristow said that he was mourning something else as well. Characters like Jocky aren't as common in the game as they used to be, he said.
That is starting to change thanks to the speedy, sparkly presentation on Sky. Craig (The Gambler) Taft sets up his iPad to show me what he means and he's right: there's no hanging about and there's a loud, gladiatorial atmosphere. "It's the pace of it on TV that's changed," says Craig. "When you watched it years ago, it was slow and if you watch the snooker now, it's the same." But Craig thinks there's still work to be done to spread the revival in the game further. "There's a revival, but there's a long way to go to get it going in the pubs again. We can play here one week and come back the next and our names are still up on the blackboard from the week before."
Barry Hearn, chairman of the PDC and the man Craig and his friends often namecheck as the one who has done more than anyone to revive the game in the UK, thinks it has largely moved on from the pubs and reached another level. "The sports market has changed," he says. "Customers want guaranteed entertainment, they prefer faster results, 20-20 cricket style, they want to be entertained by personalities. Darts players are never going to be rivalling Usain Bolt on the 100m block, neither are they probably going to earn what premier league footballers earn, but they are beautifully ordinary. There's an association between that bloke up there that reminds you of a bloke down the boozer or the bloke next door. The crowd at darts are as big a part of the show as the darts players themselves."
Hearn agrees with everyone else that the reason darts faded in the 1980s was that television lost interest. "The sport wasn't treated seriously by the broadcasters and the sponsors because it was a pub game. Darts is no longer a pub game. It's working man's golf. You can watch premier league darts for £20 and see the top players in the world. And with people like Prince Harry coming along to the darts, it's become classless; it's not just associated with the boozer."
But has it really become classless and family friendly? There are family areas during the big shows, but there is still a harder edge to the game at times, particularly when Scotland and England meet - Anderson has had to deal with what might, at best, be called gamesmanship and Hogan has seen players being spat at ("Sometimes there are too many people with too much to drink," he says). But Anderson says the atmosphere has changed and points out that Stephen Fry is big fan. Martin Amis has also often spoken of his love for the game ("tiddlywinks in a bear pit" he calls it), and a film version of his novel about a darts player, London Fields, will be released later this year.
But isn't this classless stuff just middle-class people getting a thrill from something that's seen as a little edgy and rough? Hearn doesn't think so and believes there has been a genuine change in audiences. "There are two changes we've noticed- the age of the spectator has dropped from 45 to 55 to 20 to 30; and the number of women in attendance has risen from one per cent to over 20 per cent."
Hearn also believes the change in the look of the game has helped: there's no longer any drinking or smoking on stage, although a lot of it still goes on behind the scenes. "Not allowing smoking and drinking on stage was a good move," says Hearn. "The whole perception of darts has been elevated over the last 10 years and the peak audience for the World Darts Championship on Sky was double the Ryder Cup, it was bigger than Formula One and it was bigger than the live final of the league cup. And that is an incredible testament to where the game has gone."
Hearn also believes Anderson has been one of the key figures in the revival and has nothing but good things to say about the Scot, who he says will be earning a million pounds a year very soon. Anderson is also part of Hearn's strategy for modernising the game still further and encouraging new talent through darts academies. Anderson, who's 44, has launched such an academy at Bannerman High School in Baillieston in Glasgow and believes it can be good for children's mental and mathematical skills. "The game could be great for schools," he says. "It's all mental arithmetic - it keeps the old noggin ticking over. You've got to work out what you're going for as you're throwing. A dartboard is like a calculator. You're having fun, but you're learning."
Anderson knows the truth of that from personal experience, as he struggled with counting when he first started playing. He has also come through a difficult period where he lost interest in the game after the death in quick succession of his brother and his father (his brother Stuart died of a heart attack aged 35 in 2011 and his father Gordon just a few months later).
"I just didn't want to play," he says. "There are days when you turn up at your job and you can't be arsed and there were days when I woke up and didn't want to do my job. I was feeling down - I wasn't enjoying it and I didn't want to play. My agent Tommy Gilmour told me to keep going and Rachel got me back on the dartboard last year and I just put the time in and got it back."
And he got it back in some style, beating Phil Taylor in the final of the PDC World Darts championship in January. It was the end of two difficult years for Anderson, but it was part of a revival for the game as a whole as well, and it's still going. But what Anderson loves is the idea that you can join in the revival for under 50 quid, the cost of a board and some darts. There's a lot of money on the circuit, he says, but once you have a board and some arrows, the beautiful thing about the lively, loud, rowdy, colourful game of darts is that it's absolutely free.
Gary Anderson plays Raymond van Barneveld in Live Premier League Darts from the Manchester Arena on Sky Sports 1 on Thursday at 7pm.
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