Then & now

Eric Bristow, darts champion

LAST WEEK’S World Grand Prix darts championship in CityWest in Dublin featured some of the world’s greatest darts players, including 15-times world champion Phil “the Power” Taylor, regarded by many as the greatest darts player of all time. The championship brought back fond memories of watching the darts on TV during the 1980s, when players would step up to the oche with a dart in one hand and a fag in the other, and take big swigs of beer between each throw.

Back then, the undisputed king of the oche was Hackney man Eric Bristow, known as the Crafty Cockney. On TV, he looked the picture of confident concentration, eyeballing the board along his aquiline nose, raising his pinkie as though about to take a sip of tea from a china cup, and then effortlessly hitting the treble 20. The most memorable matches of the time were those between Bristow and his great rival, Scotsman Jocky Wilson. When Wilson died of lung disease earlier this year, aged 62, Bristow joined the hundreds of friends and fans at his funeral in Kirkaldy.

Back in the 1980s, darts was a dangerous sport – players risked respiratory illness from the smoke-filled halls, and liver disease from the Olympian amounts of booze on tap. Bristow’s career, however, was scuppered by another hazard of the game – dartitis, a psychological condition that affects a dart-player’s throw. Bristow battled the condition, and eventually got back in the game, but he never regained his winning form, and watched as his protege, Phil Taylor, took his world’s greatest darts player crown.

He retired from professional darts in 2000, but went on to earn big money playing exhibition matches around the world. Last year, he went on the Bullseye theatre tour with fellow darts legends John Lowe and Bob Anderson, re-enacting the popular TV darts/quiz show hosted by Jim Bowen. But the boozy legacy of his sport followed him – in 2005, he was accused of assaulting his wife after a drunken row. He was subsequently cleared.

Bristow is back on our TV screens next month – he’s been announced as one of the stars heading to the Australian jungle for the latest series of I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here.

Watch out for poisoned darts, Eric.