The investigative journalists missed this one. Foul four on them. After much searching of my own I have uncovered a scandal from the seventies that will bring more shame to the disgraced BBC. For this one there should be arrests. There was a TV programme that conned viewers into thinking that what we were watching was for real. Yet the balls never lie.
The series in question is Pot Black. Pot Black showed one frame, I’ve got to do a BBC here and repeat this statement for clarity, showed one frame of snooker a week. Now in this snooker age we live in Tournament matches go ahead in various clusters: first to five frames, best of 15 frames and various other combinations. Pot Black dealt in one frame.
Professional snooker players can knock a frame off in no time if the balls fall kindly. Ten reds and ten blacks and the frame is over. Close frames are rare. Once an opportunity arises one of the players disappears over the horizon. In Pot Black, however, all of the frames are as close as Glenn. How can this be? Why did no one get a century break? Because like the US quiz show in the fifties, it was fixed.
Higgins and Maguire had precursors. Analysis of a few episodes revealed that there were deliberate misses and poor positional play to let the other guy get a shot. An obvious way to achieve this would be to not chalk the cue. It wouldn’t make stimulating TV if one player had it sewn up in ten minutes. If this happened, the broadcaster would have to run a few Tom and Jerry cartoons to fill the time up. So the producers and players were in cahoots.
Furthermore, why were there no long frames? Cat and mouse games of safety play were not in evidence. Week on week the frame ended just as the transmission time was up. Well, it is time that there is a public inquiry into this. The pot is definitely black.
Boadicea's Chariot 
And the classic comment was, “For those watching in black and white, the blue is behind the brown!”
Did any one actually care?
I guess I missed this as I was in Memphis at the time. There we were treated to far more stimulating TV, we got to watch local race riots, much more fun! Blacks trying to burn the Federal buildings down town fighting the National Guard on a nightly basis.
Or, if you were really bored you could tour the redneck areas and watch drive by shootings live.
And the now-disgraced DLT did snooker on the radio! (Not really but that’s what he called his quiz.)
CO: The blacks were usually the first to go down in Memphis.
Well if they had any sense (and IQ) they headed for Chicago and never came back!
All great fun and highly instructive for a country girl to see tanks on the streets, burning crosses etc.
Interestingly in those days foreigners such as ourselves were allowed to buy guns quite easily, but then we both held gun licences from the UK which may have helped. I couldn’t buy a gun round here now even as a resident.
CO: Washington state is a bit of an exception, most states do not discriminate against furriners.
Yes, WA has considerably differing law to everywhere else here in a lot of differing areas, in fact, sometimes one wonders whether one is in the same country!
Spousal unit spent most of his life in New York and Texas, neither of which bear any resemblance whatsoever to here except Federal taxes!
PS it is interesting that we cannot deal with the house in Texas out of Bank of America accounts here in WA. We have to hold a duplicate set of bank accounts as even the banking law is quite different.
Weird or what? It must make it very difficult for the banks to function.
Talking about fixes ….
How do we know that the split screen that we see in darts is actually a correct representation of the throw?
Have a look at the clip hereunder, the darts on the left could simply be an edit of darts thrown in a practice session (not necessarily consecutively) remixed by a clever editor and broadcast for maximum effect!
It’s no use suggesting that the crowd are watching, they are so far away they only see and cheer what’s on the 2 giant screens in front of them.
Oh, and one more thing, the spectators, there are literally thousands of them, surely there are more interesting things to do in London then pay to watch this from miles away? Then again perhaps not 😉
Come on , guys. You’ll be suggesting next that wrestling is fixed too. 🙂