At the final of the 2024 PDC World Darts Championship, 16-year-old rank outsider Luke ‘The Nuke’ Littler came within a whisker of a historic victory. Any disappointment had to be dealt with quickly – no sooner had he stepped off the stage at Alexandra Palace than he was jetting off to Bahrain for another competition. As one sage commentator observed on Radio 4’s Today programme this was something the teenager from Warrington, who’d still netted himself a tasty £200,000 for losing, was going to have to get used to. A gruelling life of first class air travel in glamorous locations awaited him from now on.
Littler-mania caused many, myself included, to reflect on the last time darts crashed into the national consciousness when, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the likes of Jocky Wilson and Keith Deller became household names. This revolution had happened quickly after after ITV’s World of Sport had broadcast the News Of The World Individual Darts Championship from Alexandra Palace in 1972. As with snooker, another bar-room game with historically shady connections to illegal gambling that had made the leap into people’s living rooms, it was the arrival of colour television at the fag end of the 1960s that finally made darts a viable small-screen spectacle. It began racking up the ratings from the mid-70s onwards, when the BBC also picked up on the sport and one time Grandstand producer Nick Hunter began experimenting with multiple camera angles. By utilising two cameras and a split screen, it was possible to simultaneously show both the board as the darts thudded into it and the player on the oche, every emotion flashing across their face as they lobbed each arrow. This relatively simple technical innovation kept the viewer locked into the action, with no confusing jump cuts between board and thrower. It helped ensure that millions tuned in to see nail-biting contests between the likes of the ‘man in black’ Alan ‘The Ton Machine’ Glazier and the diminutive Welsh master Alan ‘The Arrow’ Evans. A golden age for the game on the box (and clearly for men called Alan) was duly ushered in at a point when UK television audiences were still limited to just three terrestrial channels.
The reporting on Littler’s rapid rise to fame late last and early this year brought images flooding back of an earlier icon of the game hauling himself around Britain on slam-door British Rail Trains, all royal blue and tartrazine livery, with a reassuring quantity of interior woodwork. Those images, almost arc-welded into my retinas after seeing them fleetingly years ago, were from Arrows, a peerless documentary (currently up on the BBC’s iPlayer here) about Eric Bristow made at the very moment when his career was on the brink of going stratospheric.
Shot in 1979, when the self-styled Crafty Cockney was only twenty-two but already considered one the best darts players in the world, was the work of the Kilmarnock-born filmmaker John Samson. A working class radical Bohemian, Samson served an apprenticeship on the shipyards of the Clyde where he became politically active in trade union strikes and protests against nuclear weapons. Taking up photography (and the guitar), he fell in with a more raffish Glasgow Art School set and went on to study at the London Film School in the mid-1970s.
As a documentarian he was drawn to demimonde special interest groups and unfashionable hobbyists. Perhaps his best-known, or most-quoted, film is Dressing For Pleasure (1977). This profile of rubber and leather fetishwear aficionados includes incredible, if much-re-used, footage of Malcolm McLaren and Vivian Westwood’s Sex boutique on the Kings Road and its sales assistant-cum-figurehead, Jordan Mooney – the Mondrian-make-up sporting beehived Valkyrie in spiked heels who turned a young Adam Ant’s head. Tattooists and their clients, steam railway enthusiasts, the sex lives of the disabled and adventure playgrounds were other Samson topics in an output that, if exceptional, eventually amounted to barely half a dozen films. The run was spread over eight or so years, though he seems to have been gainfully employed in the industry for long after that.
Arrows should by rights have catapulted Samson into the big league, although you also suspect that was probably the last thing this singular director, who died in 2004, would ever have wanted. The film, handled by GTO, the company who made Alan Clarke’s Scum in the same year, was widely seen as it ran as the support to a box office hit: The Long Good Friday. That gritty London gangland thriller starred Bob Hoskins as Harry Shand, a luxury house-boat-dwelling, Tory-supporting mob boss turned property developer floating a bent docklands development scheme on a murky river of Common Market cash. Its pairing with Arrows is fascinating. Both pictures offer prescient snapshots of Britain on the brink of transformative change, each none more demonstratively products of 1979, that most pivotal of years, politically, socially and culturally. Production wrangles over The Long Good Friday would mean that neither film actually reached the cinema-going general public until March 1981. By then, perhaps fortunately for all concerned, Bristow had ascended to red top tabloid sporting gold, having only two months earlier scooped the Embassy World Darts Championship for the second year running at the Jollees Cabaret Club in Stoke-on-Trent.
Like the Finsbury Park-raised Hoskins, Bristow was a North London boy, a son of Stoke Newington in Hackney. Though his romance with spirited arrow-thrower Maureen Flowers of Norton Green (Elizabeth Taylor to his Richard Burton in darting terms), would subsequently see him make Staffordshire his long-term home, at the time of Arrows he remained bunked up in his parents gaff, a resolutely un-gentrified, three-storey Victorian terrace on Milton Grove. A house, as the film shows, with earthy brickwork in obvious need of repointing, a battered front door with peeling shit-brown paintwork, and wonky sash windows shaded by a mishmash of greying net curtains. Bristow is filmed playing darts against his father in an upstairs box bedroom stuffed with more trophies than furniture. We later see him shove virtually the whole wire-hanger strung, Bri-nylon, contents of a tiny plywood wardrobe into a suitcase before heading out to a black cab bound for Kings Cross St Pancras. The station itself appears just as down at heel as the Bristow abode, as it’s almost entirely enmeshed in a web of scaffolding.
Bristow Senior, Zapata-moustached and in a wing-collared shirt open to the neck revealing a gold chain and medallion, was a plasterer by trade but has the look of an ageing spiv with some hooky nylons to offload. Yet it was largely down to him that the Concorde-nosed Eric avoided a life of crime. In his autobiography, Bristow Jr relates jimmying phone boxes for ready cash at thirteen before progressing to burglary and running with the ‘Oxton boys crew, a claw-hammer permanently stuffed in his trousers to fend off rival gangs. Darts became his escape.
A scene in Arrows effectively recreates the countless matches staged at home before his father felt his protege good enough (at fourteen) to take down to the Arundel Arms. This was the boozer on Boleyn Road, long since demolished, to which Bristow Sr disappeared each and every Sunday to sink pints and play darts for six penny bets before returning for the family roast come afternoon closing time. Now the son was to be educated in the art of pub darts hustling – not that Eric, everyone in the film seems to agree, had all that much to learn.
After eighteen months of concerted effort at the Arundel Arms, Bristow had left school and turned semi-pro, beating all comers across the capital and beyond. Operations then switched to The Red Lion on Stoke Newington Church Street, an establishment with a decent backroom for darts but with a clientele, he recalled years after the fact, who were predominantly Irish and given to violent brawling after supping long and hard after pay day on a Thursday. Another pub, an ersatz London boozer in California, was to supply the player with his stage name. Bristow came across The Crafty Cockney, a Union Jack festooned ale house (“owned by a bloke called Les”) in Santa Monica on his first trip to America in 1975. He’d gone to the west coast, chaperoned by his dad, to compete as the youngest member of a UK darts team alongside rotund Welshman and future World Champion Leighton Rees.
In nearly all his films, Samson eschews voiceover narration, and Arrows is no exception. Such background biographical information on Bristow, and his rapid rise to darting glory along with his thoughts on the game and much else are relayed via a live-on-air studio interview on Radio Trent. An interview conducted by Chris Ashley, the station’s combative sports presenter. A ‘loud mouthed’ broadcaster said to be notorious for giving ‘a lot of lip to Nottingham Forest fans.’ Ashley and Bristol’s extended and sometimes testy conversation is woven across the whole film. It’s interspersed between archive TV footage of the sportsman’s’ triumphs to date with loquacious commentary from Sid ‘Voice of Darts’ Waddell, and an unfolding central fly-on-wall document of the Crafty Cockney’s journey from London to Nottinghamshire to play an exhibition match in the Blidworth Miners Welfare social club outside Mansfield.
This latter element, and much like So You Wanna Be A Rock N Roll Star, Mark Kidel’s brilliant tour film of pub-rock hopefuls The Kursaal Flyers, lays bare the dreary lot of itinerant showmen hoofing it around Britain in the late 1970s: a country well stocked with hotels as brutally basic as East German hospitals and where McEwan’s Export is the standard drinks offering on British Rail buffet cars. Bristow avails himself of at least two cans’ worth on his train north, his eyes hooded by a pair of sunglasses with tinted lenses large enough to windscreen an Austin Maxi, and a permanent Marlboro red on the go.
Forget Withnail and I, Arrows is the killer drink-a-long film and at barely half an hour long all the more deadly for it. Pint after pint passes Bristow’s lips and yet his aim, the trademark little-finger crooked out like a dowager taking tea at the vicarage, miraculously, magnificently, never slips. A contemporaneous Not The Nine O’Clock News comedy skit in which Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith appeared as two barrel-bellied darts players who competitively down drinks (“It’s a good start… double vodka, single pint…”) instead of throwing arrows, if contemptuous of working class culture in predictable Footlights fashion, nevertheless hit the bullseye.
The world of Arrows is one seemingly untouched, sartorially at least, by the punk rock of the time. Bristow has feather-cut centre-parted hair, wears flared leisure slacks, stack-heeled shoes, and chunky jewellery. The majority of those he encounters along the way are dressed in similar style, though others could have stepped out of the 1950s. On the oche he peps himself up with quotes from such staple TV shows of the era as Dad’s Army and Kojak, uttering “You stupid boy” and “Who loves ya baby?” sotto voce, according to how the darts have landed.
The soundtrack too, mines a pure seam of 1970s-ness. That is the 1970s-ness of Supertramp, say, or Leo Sayer and Kiki Dee as heard on daytime Radio 1. It was provided by members of jobbing comedy northern club circuit rockers Beano, who came 11th in the UK’s Song for Europe selection round in 1977 (the winner was Lynsey de Paul with ‘Rock Bottom’). They were back again and no more successfully for further Eurovision punishment three years later following a Korgis-esque new-wave-y makeover and name-change as Scramble.
Their eponymous theme song, an agreeable piano-driven power ballad with an infectious chorus with lines about “Arrows flying through the night… like birds in flight”, backed by the more countrified number ‘Every Picture Tells A Story’, also used in the film, was released as a single in 1981 and credited to The Crafty Cockney Band, although a contact address on the back of the record for Hessle in North Humberside hinted that the group’s regular beat was possibly some distance from the sound of Bow Bells.
And yet Bristow is oddly punk-ish. He’s bracingly unabashed about his talent, forthright about wanting to win, and exudes an overwhelming hatred of the upper crust sporting establishment. Adopting a posh voice, he mocks the “oh sorry old chap, you played rather well but you lost” pink gin and blazer brigade, telling Ashley, “I don’t wanna be no gentleman… a gentleman don’t win nothin’.”
Ashley’s opening schtick is to lump darts in with such “Mickey Mouse sports” as squash, badminton, tiddlywinks and croquet and he invites his listeners to marvel at the injustice that “such a cocky young man” as Eric Bristow, whom he also brands “big headed” and “conceited”, might be on the way to making a million quid from lobbing a few arrows around. Bristow is unbowed. “I am just a great dart player,” he says flatly, refusing to indulge in any false modesty and is unashamed about his success.
Bristow tells Ashley that most of the people he meets at exhibition matches have some preconception of him based on seeing him on television. His job, as he sees it, is to win doubters over by playing to the best of his ability. But it is the void in his personal life that comes across most strongly. He confesses to having no friends, as resentment at his success has gradually destroyed once trusted relationships with old associates.This young-won fame has had a profound interest on his life; Bristow outlines that he was only seventeen, just a year older than Luke Littler, when he first came to public prominence thanks to television coverage of darts.
Not unlike Last Days, Gus Van Sant’s non-biopic of Kurt Cobain, Arrows is a study in the isolating nature of fame. When a female questioner in the Blidworth miners social club asks him “Will you come, again?”, Bristow quips, in full Carry On mode, “that’s what someone asked me last night”. But his double entendre rings rather hollow. A few flirtatious exchanges with giggly Farrah Fawcett-haired Nottinghamshire autograph seekers is about as sexual as it gets. The darts star is shot mostly alone and biding his time in between matches drinking lager in dimple pint mugs in dismal dressing rooms with mirrors illuminated by spare, bare bulbs. There is a genuinely quite surreal moment, when after besting 16 local Mansfield players, a middle-aged woman persuades Bristow to sign her purse, as if his financial good fortune might rub off on her.
En route to the venue, Bristow and his manager drive through working coalfields that only a few years later will be embroiled in the miner’s strike, and shut not long after that. Bristow unwittingly is a harbinger of a coming age in which celebrity rather than industry will be the most valued commodity. Samson’s documentary equally foreshadows Bristow’s own end; The Crafty Cockney dying at 60 in 2018 of a heart attack after doing what he did so often did best, contentedly playing an exhibition match in Liverpool’s Echo Arena. The peaks and troughs of his career in-between (dartitis, marital discord, ill-advised online comments et al) all but erased; the game winning out, ultimately, as games always do.
Travis Elborough is an award-winning author and broadcaster. Elborough’s books include Wish You Were Here: England on Sea and The Long-Player Goodbye, a hymn to vinyl records that inspired the BBC4 documentary When Albums Ruled the World, in which he also appeared, His Atlas of Unexpected Places had just been published in a new and revised paperback edition.
