Darts and the English: a love story

Let’s break out the fancy dress and storm Ally Pally

A lot of my readers on here are American – just under 50 per cent, in fact.¹ And as the dominant cultural power on the planet, you guys often have very specific ideas about the UK; this presents me with a problem, because occasionally I want to write about quite specifically British topics, and I can’t.

The other anglophones get us. Despite the adventures of the Bush era, it’s the Irish and the Aussies who are still our closest cousins, those fellow pasty freckled types on the imperial periphery who enjoy a brew (both types) and aren’t scared of profanity in the workplace or indeed, anywhere else. In fact, I’ve written about the relationship between England and Ireland in the past; maybe I can do a big piece further down the line on bogans, hooning, goon sacks. These guys live in British cities, and vice versa, at vastly higher rates than Americans do. So, septics – England is still a mystery to many of you, and I think it’s time for a quick lesson. (It might shock you, but I do write about things that aren’t film, occasionally.)

You may think you understand England’s Geist, but you do not. England is not the smell of powder and grapeshot lingering over Spanish corpses at Trafalgar, nor the genteel tragedy of EM Forster and Virginia Woolf. It’s not Kipling’s noble Anglo-Saxon, nor our psychosexual preoccupation with Maggie and her wire-brush hair, and not even the stammering milquetoast diversity of the Blair era. It’s not the thwack of leather on willow. It’s not even football, not really.

England is 4,000 people bellowing the hook from “Chase the Sun”, over and over again, at Alexandra Palace, tanked up on four-pint pitchers of Amstel and dressed variously as knights errant, Smurfs or, I dunno, Bill & Ben the Flowerpot Men. Ali G. Crayons. Pieces of cauliflower. Whatever.

England is a day at the fucking darts.

The stereotype that haunts the sport of darts is that it’s a pastime for beefy, puce men with questionable views on the ECHR, the sort who frequent pubs with flat roofs and slobbering XL Bullies in every corner waiting to pounce. You know: “Stop the Boats” types.

That couldn’t be further from the truth. Well, okay – it might be partially true. Professional darts boasts, for now at least, an unapologetically white and male following, a broad demographic group which would turn the delicate stomach of a BBC casting director. This is a sport that supposedly began as a pastime of archers in the Middle Ages – apocryphally but pleasingly, the same archers who invented the two-fingered salute – before becoming codified in an Edwardian pub and popularised in the ale-swilling, aspic-drenched Britain of the 1970s. You can see, then, why darts events have always had a touch of the raucous.

Professional darts competitions are blowout affairs. The highlight of the season is the PDC² World Darts Championship, which since 2008 has taken place at north London’s Alexandra Palace, the huge Victorian exhibition centre named for Edward VII’s wife, Alexandra of Denmark, but better known to everyone as Ally Pally. Fancy dress – for the fans, not the players – is all but mandatory, hence Ali G and all the rest of them (nuns are typically popular, as are costumes of the Pope and the late Queen). Paddy Power, the Irish betting company, sponsors the PDC championships, and most fans are armed with a big branded “180” placard to wave when somebody hits a triple 20 three times in a row. Other signs have a big white space on which fans can write a message to wave at the TV cameras: UP THE MIDDLESEX or Reisegruppe Unangenehm! or Yer Da Sells Avon or I ONLY DRINK BORDEAUX.

In the spirit of the 1660s, the English’s closest rivals are from the Netherlands. British players make up 19 of the top 25 players in the PDC’s Order of Merit (basically a ranking of prize money won over the last two years). However, the list is periodically punctuated by dastardly Dutchmen with names like Michael van Gerwen, Danny Noppert, Gian van Veen and Dirk van Duijvenbode – God help any dyslexic born in Delft – with Belgium and Germany also decently well represented.

Until recently, these men were happy to juke it out for the PDC prize pot under the radar; darts was a sport with relatively few superstars, the last player having become a UK household name being Phil “The Power” Taylor in the 1990s. But lately, a heroic enfant terrible has emerged from his Warrington bedroom to re-energise the game: Luke Littler.

A Benjamin Button type, Littler burst onto the scene aged 16 with the pate and paunch of a 40-year-old. He’s fucking good at darts, having won 10 titles on the PDC tour in 2024 alone, crowning it all off with a PDC World Title last month (he came second the year before). Littler’s appeal is not just that he’s talented, but that he’s so young he couldn’t legally celebrate his victory with a pint; he’s such an extremely unlikely sporting hero. Like a typical teenager, Littler loves gaming, streaming FIFA on Twitch and partnering with Xbox for a shirt sponsorship deal. There are rumours of an upcoming Littler-inspired Fortnite skin, which would be quite something.

Alfred. Nelson. Churchill. Littler.

When he came up against Michael van Gerwen in the PDC final last month, the anticipation in the country was palpable. In the same way you might see friends and family members become experts in the overtime rules of curling if your country does unexpectedly well in the Winter Olympics, people who previously had no interest in darts were suddenly using words like oche and baby ton and bulling up. Littler became a regular feature in the Daily Mail’s gossip pages. He despatched Van Gerwen 7-3 in front of a baying, elated Ally Pally crowd, and was promptly crowned BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year, becoming the first ever darts player to win. Littler is now ranked number two in the world by the PDC, second only to fellow Englishman Luke Humphries.

Luke Littler’s rise has delivered a windfall to darts more widely. Former PDC chairman Barry Hearn, the sports promoter who oversaw the organisation from 2001 to 2021 when he passed it to his son Eddie, noted that Littler’s popularity could force the darts into a larger venue, perhaps a bigger hall at Ally Pally, such was the demand for tickets. Hearn, the man who is probably most responsible for darts’ explosion in popularity in the last two decades, thought he could sell up to 250,000 tickets over the month-long PDC World Championship. “The bigger hall at Ally Pally needs a lot of work done to it,” he told PA Media in 2024, “but it could handle 6,000 [fans] per session…I am not a gambler, but sometimes you get a curveball like Luke Littler and you have to rethink your strategy.”

Popular legend has it that in 1908, a Yorkshire landlord called William “Foot” Anakin was taken to court for allowing darts to be played on his premises at the Adelphi Inn in Leeds. The game was considered one of chance, meaning the law saw it, essentially, as illicit gambling. The story goes that Foot Anakin argued that the game required skill, and to demonstrate, erected a board in the courtroom. He promptly threw 20, 20, 20, then challenged the clerk of the court to throw; the man missed the board twice then hit a single seven. Nobody would ever disrespect darts again.

Before that, darts had been an unrecognised, vernacular game. Spake the Guardian in 2012:

The sport of darts…has been played in Britain since the Middle Ages, when archers devised an indoor version of their game to while away the hours lost to rain. Cut-down arrows were flung by hand at a target – usually the sawn-off end of a log – while folk looked on agog at the precision skills on show, cheering, singing, imbibing mead, and babbling ye incoherent non sequiturs. A pattern was set.

It had taken 500 years for the law to take notice, but the general public had always been in on it: in 1938, the forerunner to the PDC championship drew 280,000 (!) entrants from across Britain. By the 1970s the game had professionalised, and when the News of the World Darts Championship was first televised on ITV in 1972, seven million people in Britain tuned in to watch Cornishman Brian Netherton and Alan Evans of Wales throw tungsten at felt. The 1980s and 90s would then produce the two most famous darts players of all time: Eric Bristow, a.k.a. “The Crafty Cockney”, and Phil “The Power” Taylor.³

Just at the inflection point between Bristow and Taylor’s respective heights (Taylor beat Bristow, his mentor, as a 125/1 outsider in the 1990 World Championships⁴), Martin Amis gifted the world its most famous fictional darts player, the incorrigible cheat Keith Talent, in his comic novel London Fields.

Perhaps it’s telling that Amis wrote the darts-playing Talent as a cheat, in every way: darts, marriage, business. Talent scams the other characters in the book and beats his wife. He’s a porn addict and a rapist. He is in debt to loan sharks, and he dreams of winning the Duoshare Sparrow Masters, an amateur tournament worth £5,000 with (and this is the bit that really appeals to Keith) a televised final. Talent is vulgar in a muscular way (metaphorically, that is; the man himself is physically wiry, oiled and weasel-like). It’s not difficult to read the character as a pastiche of the nouveau riche Thatcherite working classes of the time.⁵

The premise of London Fields involves a murder which has been foretold by its own victim, but for most of the novel the killer is unknown. Amis has his narrator, an American named Samson Young, consider whether Talent might be the guy to eventually carry out the act:

Keith didn’t look like a murderer. He looked like a murderer’s dog. (No disrespect to Keith’s dog Clive, who had signed on well before the fact, and whom Keith didn’t in the least resemble anyway.) Keith looked like a murderer’s dog, eager familiar of ripper or body-snatcher or grave-stalker. His eyes held a strange radiance – for a moment it reminded you of health, health hidden or sleeping or otherwise mysteriously absent. Though frequently bloodshot, the eyes seemed to pierce.

The whole book is like this, equal parts funny and brutal. Despite the unforgiving darkness inherent in the character, Amis also wrote Keith Talent as a sort of everyman figure, because he thinks we’re all pathetic. In a pitch-black book where no single character is given any quarter, where humanity is painted as cowardly, hypocritical, crass, self-regarding and vicious, Talent is comically without shame – an unwittingly hilarious blowhard and a wrongun. Talent is an English (and British, probably) archetype who you might run into in any pub in the country. That’s why his sport is darts:

A casual darter or arrowman all his life, right back to the bald board on the kitchen door, Keith had recently got serious. He’d always thrown for his pub, of course, and followed the sport: you could almost hear sacred music when, on those special nights (three or four times a week), Keith laid out the cigarettes on the arm of the couch and prepared to watch darts on television.

Playing darts is very equalising, funny, a bit absurd. It is objectively funny to see fully grown, often well-padded men chuck little arrows at a colourful board in front of thousands of wasted fans who scream if they hit a 180. It’s hard to play darts and look dignified. I think Gareth Southgate knew this when he introduced the idea of the England football team taking on the press pack at darts during the 2018 World Cup. Southgate is the man credited (if nothing else) with resetting the once-toxic culture around the national team, and part of that process was a reset with the English sporting media, which can be the most brutal in the world to the country’s players. Sportsmen playing darts against the journos? Kieran Trippier versus the Guardian? John Stones versus The Sun? Nobody was going to come out of that with their egos intact.

Would the French do this? Would the Spanish? The Italians? Perhaps, or perhaps not. All I know is that in 2026 we should probably pack Luke Littler in with the cones and the training bibs and the snoods and take him to North America. Or just name him in the squad itself. We couldn’t lose.

1. Substack gives you these numbers in the Dashboard, if you look for them. Shout out to my lone subs in Kazakhstan, Somalia and Iran.

2. That’s the Professional Darts Corporation, the sport’s UK-based governing body.

3. A nickname is essential if you want to write yourself into darts history. Luke “The Nuke” Littler is well on his way.

4. From 1987 onwards, Bristow had been suffering from – I am not making this up – the condition of “dartitis”, in which a player is unable to release the dart at the right point of their throw. It’s like writer’s block but for darts. Bristow said: “It’s no fun going on stage and playing like a dickhead. It breaks your heart. I keep getting beaten by wallies.”

5. Harry Enfield’s creation Loadsamoney also comes to mind.