THERE’S a time and a place for everything and that includes sport.
Hurling in the dead of winter just feels wrong, as does soccer at the height of summer. Championship Gaelic football any time except Sunday afternoon, while more and more prevalent, still feels a bit weird, but not as weird as darts any time of the year the Christmas tree’s not up.
Sky’s aggressive promotion of the game and expansion of tournaments means it’s usually on one of their channels throughout the year. That’s all very discombobulating, especially for someone old enough to remember a time when non-World Championship darts on TV meant one thing – there was homework to be done.
Bullseye set the standard for Sunday afternoon tea-time entertainment. Even its Jim Bowen-less reboot in 2006 can’t besmirch the memory of the original and the best, a memory that only gets fonder when you watch One Hundred and Eighty! on Sky 1.
To call it Bullseye for the Premier League Darts generation is being awfully generous, unless you want to offend the Premier League Darts generation which you can do, because they’re too drunk to notice.
Davina McCall and Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff presented the hour-long abomination. Sorry, Davina ‘Mad Dog’ McCall and ‘Ferocious’ Freddie Flintoff. The programme loves nicknames so much used Flintoff’s nickname as his real name and added another nickname for good measure.
Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor and James ‘The Machine’ Wade provided the star power while two ordinary punters were labelled “The Millerman” and “The Gambler” for the purposes of keeping everything as silly as possible.
There were some general knowledge questions and some arrows and £13,000 up for grabs through a series of games that looked very futuristic given they were all basically darts.
In the end “The Gambler” kept his cool to claim the cash and the adulation of the impressively large and questionably sober crowd.
£13,000 is all very well, but over on Challenge, where Jim and Bully are still going strong, there was a wheelbarrow, a pressure washer and a Peugeot 205 to be won. There was a picture of Una Stubbs to be identified and ‘sachet’ to be spelled.
And homework to be finished.
