Luke Littler with his runner-up trophy. Photograph: Zac Goodwin/PA
There’s a great video montage of Luke Littler, made by his sister Lisa, with his first dartboard. You can hear his mum in the background, modelling a growth mindset (“Are you going to get me a 180? Go on, then”) rather than a fixed mindset (which would have sounded more like: “Holy shit, you’re a genius”).
He’s already got that triumphant flourish in his shoulder, and I want to tell you he’s got the makings, at 18 months old, of the rhythm darts player he soon became. But in good faith, I’d have to admit that I only just learned what that means: thunk, thunk, thunk, like a metronome, fast, sure and unbroken.
But the trail of his many vanquished elders probably wouldn’t want to nail down the precise ratio of nature and nurture that took the 16-year-old to the finals of the world darts championship, where, even in defeat, he really cheered everyone up. The bit that would really sting is that, in that home video where a darts star was born, he was wearing a nappy.
For the rest of the world, well, everyone loves a child prodigy. I sincerely doubt there’s a transgression in the world Tiger Woods could perform that would take the sheen off his TV appearance at two years old. But in order for the Littler wunderkind to lift this nation’s spirits, this much, from this low an ebb, even as runner-up, it had to be darts.
For a sport to have its place in the British social lexicon, it’s important that it has no whiff of privilege, no sidebar about a country club, no inevitable tiger mum or almost-made-it dad in the background, hothousing. Littler’s dad bought that first dartboard in a pound shop. It’s critically important that darts’ amateur precinct is a pub, which is more or less the cathedral of non-nationalist patriotism, that vanishingly small cultural space that Nigel Farage and Gary Lineker love the same amount.
It’s important that, while the modern player may choose not to do it, or be too young to, it is possible to play darts while holding a pint, and it’s important that players don’t break into a sweat. Athleticism, training, physical endurance, that’s all fine in its place, but a little bit ostentatious, a little bit global: only an idiot would claim those as national values. Darts, on the other hand – the irony, self-mockery and playfulness of codifying a sport that requires skill but no exertion is probably as close to the embodiment of British values as many of us would be prepared to skate.
James McMahon, in Look at What You Could Have Won, his radio documentary about Bullseye, called the gameshow a “record of the working class being left behind”, and the sport itself has always been the focus of a lot of snobbery – often, as is typical of class contempt, camouflaged under disapproval of obesity. The former director of coaching of British Athletics, Tom McNab, once described why he didn’t want to see the sport in the Olympics: “Look at the bellies on these guys; some of them are more like places than people.” It pleases me to imagine the world of darts hearing that remark – how little it would care.
If you want to see that snobbery in a purer form, you have to go back to the late 1980s when people were more upfront about it: the “darts, Keith” motif of Martin Amis’s London Fields, the anti-hero made ridiculous by attaching all his identity to something so scummy, so meagre. Amis was from a class that can only express its preferences through downward comparison, so darts was standing in as a brutishly simple echo to snooker, which he deemed complicated enough to be the gentleman’s proletarian sport. Not to speak ill of the dead, the joke was on him, because the only people who could be put off a thing they liked by the sneering of Martin Amis is other people like Martin Amis.
It feels psephologically piquant that Littler trained in St Helens, the original screwed-over red wall seat of St Helens South and Whiston, a constituency so Labour that Labour could literally deliver them a Tory (Shaun Woodward, who crossed the floor in 1999) and they’d still carry on voting Labour. All of this happened, of course, quite a long time before Littler was born.
But to call darts a culture of a “working class left behind” is to miss the fact that it’s not nostalgic or frozen, and the spectators at Ally Pally are experimental, which is to say, nuts. The superfans and attendant rise in generalists and broadcast money have made the prize pot for the PDC World Championships astronomically larger: it’s now two and a half million quid; in 1994, it was £64,000, which meant that the world’s darts champion got an amount not a million miles away from what the amateur winner of Bullseye got in caravans.
Watching Luke Littler’s rise is delightful, besides anything else, for its snapshot of the daft things 16-year-olds do: he wants to pay for all his friends to go to a theme park. But as important as it is that he’s 16, it’s also important that he’s burly, and stands like a pub landlord, the unshakable confidence of his feet on the ground, like a tree. We were rooting for this kid, but we didn’t want to feel sorry for him when he lost. It’s exactly the spirit of Bullseye. Hey, well done to the other Luke (Humphries), too. As a fan said on X, whoever won last night, darts was the winner.
• This article was amended on 5 January 2024. An earlier version said that Luke Littler “grew up and still lives” in St Helens. In fact, Littler grew up in and still lives in Warrington, but he trained in St Helens.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
