The World Snooker Championships - It's Political Correctness gone Missing in Action

The World Snooker Championship is on at the moment in Sheffield.  Although I'm still quite interested in it these days, my interest is as nothing compared to how I used to feel about it in the 80s.  It helped that there were only 3 channels on TV then, and two of them had the news on and the other one had either Laurel and Hardy re-runs or westerns on, so a big sporting event was a really big deal.  To illustrate how little worth watching there was on, I used to even watch the boat race in those days.

Weren't glasses mental in the 80s?

And I remember watching the snooker being a big family thing in the 80s.  A family consisting of me, my mum, step dad Terry and my brother Phil.  We didn't spend a lot of real quality time together, but we always enjoyed shouting at the telly together during the snooker.

There are lots of pointless things in life, and shouting at the telly is just one of them.  No need to tell me it has no effect whatsoever.  I know this because we always shouted the loudest for Jimmy White, always willing him to win it, although he never did, and we always shouted for Steve Davis to lose, and that didn't work either.

Hey Phil, it's only taken us 30 years to make it to the snooker!  Happy Birthday! And to me too!

One of the few times Steve Davis did lose was in the famous 1985 black ball final against Dennis Taylor.  That one seemed to finish around 2 in the morning, and by the end it wasn't so much edge of the seat stuff, we'd all abandoned the sofa hours earlier, and we were on our hands and knees on the floor screaming at the telly.  And we were all desperate for Dennis Taylor to win, which he did.  Along with Botham at Headingley in 1981 and England vs Germany in the semi final at Italia 90, this might be up there in my top 3 most memorable sporting events I've ever seen.

After about 20 years of relative apathy, in recent years I got back into watching the snooker again, mostly because it was something I could do with my mum.  As her legs and lungs didn't really work for about the last 10 years, sitting and watching TV together was one of our main activities.  And because she was capable of hating certain sportsmen just because she didn't like the expression on their faces when they were concentrating, or because they did a fist pump to the crowd when they won, it gave us something to talk about too.  And when Phil and I used to watch it with her, and listening to her often quite arbitrary reasons for hating and loving certain players, we always said we should really get tickets and go to the Crucible to see it for real.  But we never did.

You can't tell, but we're both really annoyed in this picture at having to share 50 pence

I think that was why after she died in November, I thought it would be a good idea to buy Phil Crucible tickets for his birthday in December, so that we could finally do that thing we said we always would.  By some absolute fluke, the tickets I bought for him were for the day before my birthday in April, so if I got him to take me with him, it was like my present too.  This seemed appropriate to me, because when we were children, we would always get 50 pence sellotaped to the inside of a birthday card from my grandma, and she would always write 'Don't forget to share it with your brother'.  And we used to go mental trying to explain to mum that we shouldn't have to share our birthday money, but we always had to, because that was what grandma wanted.

Unfortunately, the two matches we were scheduled to see at the Crucible on Monday night were so one-sided that they were finished within an hour of the start, so we thought we might get very little for my money, but then they decided to wheel out some former stars to do a bit of 'entertainment'.

Look who we met at the snooker... Actually it just felt like we did

And that was where the evening started to get very strange indeed.  A so-called exhibition match started between Ken Doherty and Stephen Hendry and out came Dennis Taylor to commentate, the first time ever I'd seen him in real life, 30 years almost since I was screaming through the TV screen for him to beat Steve Davis.

And it was as if Phil and I had got in a time machine and gone back to the mid-80s to watch an episode of 'The Comedians'.  Ken and Dennis started cracking jokes and one-liners the likes of which haven't been seen on TV since the days of Bernard Manning.  Mick and Paddy jokes, and jokes about the Chinese and a few borderline homophobic remarks, and of course many of the audience were lapping this up, the big wide blokes with tattooed heads who we'd seen necking pints in the bar were delighted and started shouting out unfunny and drunken things to get their own piece of the action.

And the Chinese people who were there, who may have been relatives of the Chinese players or the Chinese referee didn't seem to know what to make of it.  And you could tell we were no longer going out live on the BBC, or they'd have been shut down.

And some of Ken's and Dennis's act was in parts quite 'entertaining' but it also left me quite glad that we've moved on from laughing at racial stereotypes, and people who are gay.

I found out this week that Terry died in 1999.  We lost touch with him in about 1990 when he and my mum split up.  He was in a bad way then, so in a way I'm surprised he lasted another decade.  Lots of things went wrong for him during the 80s, and as the decade went on, he just kept drinking more and more to try and deal with it until his life went out of control.  Just after mum died, Phil and I were wondering if he was still alive, and if he was, whether he would come to the funeral, and that was what prompted me to find out this week.  Although it's a long time ago, because I've only just found out, it's like it only just happened.

I'm not blaming myself for what went wrong in his life, because there were lots of factors at work, but I'm sure living with the 3 of us can't have been easy.  The 3 of us were very close, and I'm sure that was hard to break into and live alongside.  I know, because I've tried it myself, adding myself into an established family of 3, and apart from the not descending into alcoholism part, I'm not sure I was any better at it than him.  At the time of his leaving in 1990, it had become 'him or us'.  I wish things had ended better.  For all of us.  But often things just end, sometimes messily, and we don't control the ending.

Me and my mum - sometimes things just end, often when you're not expecting it

Thinking back now to that evening shouting at the telly in 1985, it's strange to know that two of the three people I watched it with are now dead.  And it's a vulnerable feeling.  When I see Phil now, I talk to him sometimes about how there are entire passages of my life that, aside from my own memories, he is the only living witness to.  Stories from the past that I would talk endlessly to my mum about, he is now the only link to.

I was reading a book recently about mental health, and it said in there that the thing we're all most afraid of is the obliteration of the self, that the person we are will one day be completely lost.    One day no-one will remember these memories that are so pivotal to my life, not just the 1985 snooker final, but a million other things too, and if no-one can remember things, where will the evidence be that they really happened?  Maybe that's why I write about things, to try not to lose them.

If mum was still alive, I'm pretty sure we would never have got round to going to the Crucible, and that's a weird feeling too, knowing that I was provoked to finally do something by her demise.

It's very easy to simplify things in life and for the sake of narrative to think in terms of heroes and villains, especially when you're young.  It used to be very black and white in the 80s.  Love Dennis Taylor and Jimmy White, hate Steve Davis.

Sorry Steve Davis.  If only I'd been more supportive in the 80s.  You actually seem very nice.

30 years is a long time, and I think in that time, if I've learned nothing else, it's that Steve Davis is a lot more likeable than I thought, and as of Monday, I discovered that Dennis Taylor is a bit less so, and that he needs to move with the times and get some new jokes.

In 1985 I was an arrogant 17 year old who thought he had all the answers.  And sometimes I would talk to Terry with that arrogance and I wasn't above pointing out to him where he was going wrong in life.  I'm 47 now, and having had almost 30 years of being an adult, and trying to manage homes, jobs, relationships etc, I realise now, that being a grown up is much harder than it looks when you're 17.  It's a shame I'll never get to tell him that.

But I have finally solved the age old problem of what to do about mine and Phil's birthdays.  It's always been a struggle to think of what to get each other.  Now I know I just need to buy us both a present for his birthday in December, and we can go and enjoy it together on mine in April.

I think grandma would approve, and I'm sure mum would too.