Grandstand suffers slings of outrageous arrows

It was all happening in Bridlington over the weekend. Now there is a sentence I never expected to write. And frankly it would have remained unwritten had I not entered the alternative universe that is Grandstand, broadcast live from the Yorkshire bucket-and-spade resort in honour of the 29th Winmau World Masters Darts Championships.

The other 28, I must confess, rather came and went without impinging on my consciousness to any great extent. But that's life for you.

One minute you are a student, then you embark on a career, get married, raise a family; and the next thing you know is that 28 Winmau World Masters Darts Championships have passed you by.

One possible explanation for my blissful ignorance of "The Winmau," as Bobby George rather optimistically called it, as though it were some kind of red letter day in the world of sport, is that darts in recent years has been riven by a damaging split.

This has meant the failure of some of the best known players to participate in tournaments billed as world championships, and a consequent lack of public interest.

The most notable absentee has been Phil "The Power" Taylor, who achieved fame through a nine-dart finish, the Pulitzer Prize of darts, and notoriety through some shenanigans he was alleged to have got up to in a motor home with two darts groupies.

The very idea of darts attracting groupies - albeit ones who tend to be built more on the lines of Vanessa Feltz than Vanessa Redgrave - sort of tickled the public fancy; not to mention the detail of the motor home malarkey, which, in the modern parlance, is so not Angus Deayton.

While Taylor parks his caravan outside tournaments organised by the Professional Darts Corporation Limited (PDC), the Winmau comes under the auspices of the British Darts Organisation (BDO). This is unfortunate. Boxing may well have the history, the worldwide appeal, and the broad shoulders to support rival organisations, but even the most dedicated of darters must accept that two organising bodies in the world of darts is approximately one too many.

The PDC contests are broadcast on Sky and commentated on by Sid Waddell, who should be knighted for services to columns such as this - "He looks about as happy as a penguin in a microwave," was his description of one contestant going through a difficult time.

The BBC has been left with the BDO tournaments, their new-found enthusiasm for trailing round the purlieus of Essex and working-class Yorkshire seaside resorts coinciding almost exactly, interestingly enough, with their loss of rights to park up for sandwiches and champers at Twickers, or party on down round the formula one circuit.

The relative quality of the darts played under the PDC and BDO banners is not something on which I feel qualified to comment, having little interest in the business outside my enjoyment of Sid's words.

While recognising that it takes prodigious skill to throw a dart into those tiny areas bounded by the wire dividers, and enormous bottle to do it under the lights, in front of the cameras, and in a room full of sex-crazed housewives straining to get into your Winnebago, I have always seen darts more as sports entertainment than actual sport.

I do not wish to become embroiled once more in the tedious and oft rehearsed "not a proper sport" debate. Apart from anything else, my inbox could not take the weight of angry responses from dedicated darters, being already stuffed with polite letters from Nigerians offering to make me rich beyond the dreams of avarice if I will only give them my bank account details, and invitations to take advantage of the entertainment on various lurid internet sites. But, as a respected commentator in this section of a leading broadsheet newspaper, you have to set your own guidelines on these important matters, and I have decided not to consider as a proper sport any activity in which you can participate while wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

Lest you think I am discriminating against the working classes, let me say I feel much the same way about golf, and if you want to take issue, you will have to try and get one of these sport-on-tv columns for yourself.

Grandstand, it should be said, did its best to make a virtue of a necessity, prefacing its coverage of the championships with a handsome poem by a chap called Keith Wilson, applauding the proletarian camaraderie of BDO darts, and the absence of corporate flummery, with phrases like "no flights of fame," and "retro in your face honesty," while passing lightly over the fact that the lack of all that distasteful corporate glad-handing might have something to do with the difficulty of attracting sponsors to a darts show minus Phil and Sid.

Winmau, I should say, make dartboards and darts accessories, as I discovered on the internet.

How Grandstand must yearn for the start of the FA Cup. Next week their main attraction is bowls, and as I have attracted obloquy in the past by characterising the sport as the exclusive preserve of mainly genteel elderly folk, I will merely note without comment that the tournament is the BUPA Care Homes Open Bowls. That's bowls, by the way, not bowels.