The Rack Pack, BBC iPlayer
When I was at school in the 1980s you either supported Alex Higgins or Steve Davis.
I was a Davis man, I kind of had to be. You get a bit of abuse as a red-head in school and there weren’t too many famous carrot tops.
So I idolised the Essex boy and his cerebral snooker. I remember the devastation in 1983 when Higgins came back from 7-0 to beat my hero and again two-years later when Dennis Taylor came from 8-0 to beat him in the world final.
That final holds the record for the largest ever television audience after midnight at 18.5 million.
That record will probably stand forever now that we’re into the era of catch-up TV, streaming and box-sets.
So I suppose it’s appropriate that the story of the rise of snooker from smoky back rooms to the heights of the 1985 final was told on the iPlayer only.
And despite having a terrible name - a play on Sinatra’s wild living Rat Pack - the Rack Pack was great fun.
This kind of docu-drama often suffers from poor characterisation, when the writing team is so busy packing in all the details of the story that they neglect to give the characters any depth.
There was a little bit of that here but in fairness the three main protagonists - Higgins, Davis and Barry Hearn - were more than two-dimensional.
Hearn, the promoter and manager, was played brilliantly by Kevin Bishop as a kind of successful Del Trotter.
Luke Treadaway had Higgins perfectly - the tics, the mannerisms, the whine to his voice.
There is a danger, of course, with this kind of drama that you spend your time trying to catch it out; trying to identify errors and studying how alike the actors are to the real life people.
Rack Pack passed this test. Davis (Will Merrick) was superb with one of the best scenes Hearn teaching his protege how to sip a glass of water menacingly. I’m sure it never happened but it was true to the spirit of the story.
The supporting characters were also excellent physically. Higgins introduced them to us and Jimmy White in the green room bar.
"Kirk Stevens - lock up your daughters, Tony Knowles, lock up your wives, Cliff Thorburn, lock up your ma and Dennis Taylor, lock up your granny."
But at the heart of the story was the tragedy of Alex Higgins, the man who bridged the snooker worlds of Joe Davis and the big money 1980s.
Higgins is often credited with transforming the game but Rack Pack comes down convincingly on side of Barry Hearn. It was Hearn who realised that the BBC and colour television could make millionaires of them all.
The rivalry between bad boy Higgins and water-sipping cherubic Davis was perfect soap opera but the Belfast boy was very much at the end of his career.
Higgins failed to adapt to the new world and destroyed himself with booze and bad choices.
But there was something of the lovable rogue about Higgins and it drew people to him.
His vulnerability, on display to the world after he won the 1982 final when he wept and appealed to his wife to bring their baby down to him, won him millions of fans.
And his 1989 appearance at the Masters when he hobbled around the table in a leg cast after a drunken escapade was classic Higgins.
But there was also a dark side, which was only partially covered in the Rack Pack.
Nonetheless, it’s well worth 80 minutes of your time.
