There are three stages to darts watching:
1) Pre-Christmas: a strong indicator that life is awry. It may be bleak, but there must be someone you might see or something you might do other than watch the opening round of 64 at the WDC. A stage so lacking in drama that even Sky stopped televising one match and time-filled with highlights.
2) Between Christmas and new year: essential viewing. This year with Barney's nine-darter (Barney Army!) and the Power's world-record three-dart scoring average (Beyond Bradmanesque!) it put even World's Strongest Man (The Globe's Campest Sport just got Camper!) in the shade.
3) In the new year: not a good sign.
It's understandable, perhaps inevitable, that having tasted the high-octane fare from the Ally Pally, punters will hoover up a bit of free stuff from Frimley. This usually proves a disappointment. First, BBC Sport, nothing if not earnest, makes the error of treating darts seriously. This is a mistake because we watch darts to be entertained, not informed. (Or misinformed last week when, in a so-dim-it's-embarrassing attempt to pretend the corporation's darters were the equal of Sky's, they claimed a player's average was more than a ton by conveniently ignoring his last three darts in every leg. This is the equivalent of saying a batsman has a Test average more than 50 as long as you fail to count all his scores under ten.) The need for such chicanery arises because the chasm in skill between the two organisations is wide and getting wider. You pay for premium, you receive a simulacrum for free - a strapline for our recessionary times. No one is fooled. Not the audience at Frimley (who, small quibble maybe, strike me as being insufficiently drunk), nor those resting at home. A nadir occurred when Ted "The 'Count" Hankey failed to hit not treble one, not double one, but big one, and still the seventh seed won the match. Incidentally, despite the cape and the whole shtick, sources close to Hankey say he is called "The 'Count" (sic), not in reference to Dracula, but as a slurred shortening of The Accountant, which was his nom de darts during the days when he was number-crunching his way to success on the Home Counties circuit, dispensing with such highly regarded rivals as Philip "The (Loss) Adjuster" Reeve and Andy "Human Resources" Cross. Golden days.
But the lack of quality in the action does have the benefit of giving the darts watcher more thinking time. I'm currently preoccupied by who will emerge as the Damien Hirst of football. That is to say which player will, in this transfer window, make the last best deal and become, in all probability, the best-paid footballer of our and our children's lifetime. Hirst, in a masterstroke of timing, went to market in September, weeks before Lehman brothers collapsed. Even more cannily, he cut his agent and gallery owner, Jay Jopling, out of the deal. This had twin benefits. First, he received 100% of the profits rather than sharing them 50-50 with Jopling. Second, Jopling had to contribute to these profits because, being long on Hirsts, it was vital for him to shore up the prices in Hirsts. Game, set and match to Hirst; Lily Allen to Jopling.
The art world isn't dissimilar to the football world: both were awash with money and still employ idiots near the top. Sotheby's head of contemporary art is Tobias Meyer, who said in June, "for the first time since 1914 we are in a non-cyclical market", then watched his company share price cyclically slide 75%. And the Premier League has Richard Scudamore.
Football's Joplings are easy to spot, but who will be its Damien? One would have thought it would be a Man City signing, except to get a record deal you need a competing club to up the price and Chelsea's pleas of relative impoverishment seem to be not bluff, but reality. So it's more than likely the best-ever deal has already been done. And the man who did it, topping JT and spurning José, was Frank "The 'Count" Lampard.
