Chest puffed, eyes wide and fixed on their target, Gerwyn Price steps up to the oche at the start of a new leg in the final of the Grand Slam of Darts.
His first dart pings the red treble-20 bed. His second dart nestles in alongside it. Without breaking stride Price throws his third and final dart: another treble-20. As the crowd in Wolverhampton rise to their feet, Price pumps his fist for the camera as referee George Noble fills his lungs and belts out the signature call: “ONE HUNDRED AND EIIIIIIIIIIGHTY!”
Viewers watching on Sky Sports, however, will have experienced this moment slightly differently. No sooner had Price’s second dart thudded into the treble-20 than a remote camera stationed just behind the stage was sharply zooming in to the bed, magnifying the tension ahead of the third dart. For even semi-regular watchers of darts the 180 zoom has become so familiar it is barely even noticed any more, part of the tapestry of darts for more than 40 years.
The 180 zoom is probably the most famous camera shot in the whole of televised sport. And yet it’s essentially a gimmick: an entirely confected and artificial injection of drama that bears no resemblance to anything the players themselves are experiencing on the stage. Virtually nothing like it exists in any other sport. It is the equivalent of adding a Batman-style “KAPOW!” graphic to the screen every time someone gets punched in boxing, or a comedy bassoon sound effect when a footballer misses an open goal.
Yet whereas such devices are decried and detested in other sports, darts has always been radically different. Right from the start of its existence as a professional pursuit it was designed to be a television product as much as a sport in its own right. And so really the 180 zoom is more than a piece of nifty camerawork. In a way, it is the story of how darts burst out of the pubs and clubs and took over the world.
In late November I spent an afternoon with the Sky Sports production team in Wolverhampton to see how the 180 zoom works in practice. Out in the arena a cameraman called Chris Pendlebury operates the crucial Camera Two, which is usually homed in on the treble-20. Until 2017 the zoom was still done manually but now it runs robotically, according to a pre-set computer programme. The hard part is being able to decide when to push the button.
The man who has to make that call is Keith Deller. Deller is probably best known as the 1983 world champion but these days he is one of Sky’s “spotters”, whose task is to instruct the director and camera operators where a player is going to throw his next dart. “Down!” he shouts from his seat at the back of the production truck. “Back up! Now treble-20, double-18… double nine!”
It is one of the most high‑pressured, nerveless jobs in television. Deller needs to watch the players’ eyes, so he can see when their gaze shifts down towards the treble-19. He needs to know which players like which combinations. He needs to know that some players – like Portugal’s Jose de Sousa – are prone to miscounting and throwing at the wrong number entirely.
A typical two-minute leg of darts will contain about 50 different camera shots, almost all of them commanded in real time by the spotter. “It’s hard,” he says. “But you mustn’t panic.” These days there is an added tactical dimension. Not every player who hits two treble-20s will necessarily aim for a third. Maybe the bed is blocked.
Maybe treble-19 offers a better route to a finish. “Players back in the day would just continue on the treble-20,” says the Sky analyst Wayne Mardle. “But that doesn’t always leave you the easiest route to finish. The players have evolved. There’s more money in it, it’s more professional. They’re playing the percentages.” Players such as Michael van Gerwen often like to go for three treble-19s. Others, like Michael Smith, will go for the 180 even if he’s on 182.
“There’s something special about the call of a 180,” Mardle says. “The guys get a buzz out of it. Sometimes board management goes out of the window, Russ Bray or George Noble bellows ‘180’, the crowd roars like lunatics. And just maybe, it gets into your opponent’s head.”
The tactics have changed, the psychology has changed, the pace of the game has changed, and yet what is striking is how little the product has changed. Visually speaking, darts on television is largely the same as it was more than 40 years ago, when the BBC decided to take a punt on the inaugural world championships in 1978.
Nobody really knows for sure who invented the 180 zoom. Perhaps the strongest claim lies with Nick Hunter, the former BBC Sport director in charge of organising the corporation’s coverage in the 1970s and 1980s.Until that point televised darts had largely been a messy low-budget affair, characterised by frequent awkward cuts between the player and the board and a jarring lack of visual consistency. The board itself was invariably shown in wide angle, making it hard to see where darts had landed. But at some point between the quarter-finals and the final of that 1978 championship came the transformation that would change the sport forever.
Hunter’s idea (or possibly presenter David Vine, or possibly producer Ray Lakeland, or possibly co-commentator and spotter Tony Green) was to film in split-screen, with one camera trained on the board and one on the player’s face. “This simple technical solution,” writes Dan Waddell in his book We Had Some Laughs, “changed darts from a sport that was difficult to capture to one made for the medium.”
Zooming on a 180 had been tried before on ITV’s Indoor League, but only after the third dart had been thrown. The genius of the BBC’s innovation was to initiate the zoom after the second treble, instantly letting us know that a 180 was on. It quickened the pulse. It drew the viewer in a little closer, a technique almost cinematic in its manipulation.
“The camera zoom told the story,” says Rory Hopkins, who has produced Sky’s darts coverage since 1994. “When it starts, you know you’re watching the ultimate.” These days various sports have tried similar tricks. In football La Liga has begun experimenting with a dramatic high-focus camera for its touchline shots. Cricket briefly flirted with a giddy low-angle camera shot for free hits. Inevitably such innovations have felt weird and ersatz. By contrast darts was conceived first and foremost as a piece of storytelling. It was not simply a case of pointing a camera at the action: the camera became the action.
Perhaps this explains why, through changing habits and changing audiences, darts has not just endured but thrived. While other sports fret about how to make their product more television‑friendly, darts was there long before them. The split‑screen, the facial close-ups and the 180 zoom established by the BBC in the 1970s created a powerful visual grammar that, a few minor touches aside, has endured largely unchanged until the present day: a classic formula that, in hindsight, was decades ahead of the game.
“We’ve looked at how we can make it better,” says Hopkins. “But really, they got it right the first time.”
Sky Sports Darts is showing the William Hill World Darts Championship from 15 December to 3 January.
