Pining for the auld scoundrels

When those Lifelines books came out a few years back, one contributor declared that his favourite line of poetry was the wonderful Noel Coward sentiment, "Strange how potent the lyrics of cheap music can be".

It is a beautiful line, redolent of some smoky, slow-song refrain and, of course, it remains devastatingly true. Usually, it comes to mind when Larry Gogan or some such delves into his seemingly bottomless sack of nostalgia and, at the most inopportune moments, cuts straight through your heart with three-minutes of tinny, dated slush which for whatever reason carries a poignant note.

The quality of the music is irrelevant; occasionally, on late night radio shows, people will request songs that are, no matter what the criteria, utterly appalling. But they nonetheless strike a chord.

So when on Friday afternoon's coverage from the Crucible at Sheffield, during the interval, they decided to air the full and unexpurgated video of the Chas 'n' Dave opus Snooker Loopy, was a whole generation of viewers stricken with a sudden and unwelcome wave of sentimentality?

Those of you fortunate enough to remain untainted by the sulphurous nature of Snooker Loopy, rest assured, it was a wretched little cur of a tune, relentlessly chirpy and distressingly invasive. Hear it once and you hated it, but nonetheless were forced - for entire weeks - to walk around humming possibly the worst chorus ever to see the light of day: "Pot the red and screw back for the yellow, green, brown, blue, pink and black".

Needless to say, the video footage was touchingly ill-conceived and it was a surprise to note that Chas, who in his heyday cut a madcap sort of figure, was actually a fairly morose looking character.

In retrospect, it is not difficult to understand why. But that harmless little jaunt through pop's seedier archives underlined one of the more impenetrable mysteries of TV sport: why does snooker work?

It has endured some rocky times since those halcyon days when we were all, allegedly, snooker loopy. But it's still here.

At its peak, there was a soap opera quality to snooker. It wasn't so much what the stars did crouched over the beige, it was what they did away from it. Kirk Stephens, Tony Drago, Jimmy White, Alex Higgins . . . the fascination lay in their flaws, the fact that behind the poker faces, we knew the weaknesses.

When these guys played, there was an uneasiness to the hush, a nervy and faintly thrilling sense that if they blew the next shot, they were quite liable to actually go over the edge. It was like watching Russian roulette in formal dress.

Whatever his faults, was not the expression of Alex Higgins after he triumphed in 1982 one of the more naked images of sporting truth in many years?

See, it was easy then to understand why snooker appealed to such a broad cross-section, why a grandmother could fall back on the sofa to watch the afternoon session along with, say, her otherwise mutinous and slouchy teenage godchild.

After they broadcast the Chas 'n' Dave piece, the BBC wheeled out Willie Thorne and Denis Taylor, both relics from the golden age and long perceived as the sunnier alternatives to those players who seemed racked by demons. The two old boys played a mock frame and provided their own shot-by-shot commentary. It wasn't particularly funny - at one stage, Thorne urged Taylor to hurry up, advising him that the referee was getting bored. "He's not the only one," yelled a voice in the crowd.

But it was good natured fun and confirmed a long-held suspicion that Thorne was, in fact, quite a poor snooker player who managed to survive the circuit because of his unfailingly cheery disposition and readiness to crack a poor joke.

The most striking thing about it all was that they loved it, this rapport with their audience, this playful dig at their own era. And it was easy to see why people tuned in more regularly then.

The game/sport has, of course, become populated by more even-tempered young men who are perfectly nice but not half as interesting. For instance, they appear each day looking as though they have had a good night's sleep, as opposed to having been out trawling the back streets of Sheffield. Their expressions offer nothing but inscrutability.

God be with the days when the man at the bad end of a century break could be seen in the background anxiously lighting up and firing back a swift settler. When they win now, players appear satisfied, at best, and when they lose they are contemplative and vow to work harder, which they quite probably do.

It would be interesting to establish if the profile of the TV snooker audience has changed much over the last two decades. At one stage during the week, David Vine invited us to go out to our kitchens to "make a cup of sherbert". Sherbert? Who was he talking to? Nora Batty?

At these world championships, frames were won and lost as always, but there was no sense of impending catastrophe, no real doom in the eyes of any of the contenders. Which, if we are honest, is what made the great days of snooker just that.

But still we watch, as if faithfully tuning into a soap that has lost almost all its great characters but remains an unbreakable habit. And maybe we stay loyal because, every so often, a great old yarn comes to light, a good, old-fashioned dollop of human interest.

This year we got our story. A favourite emerged. With Jimmy White obligingly betraying us yet again, Joe Swail stepped forward as our flawed hero. Joe, with his much publicised hearing impediment, and his initial shyness in the interview rooms which gave way to devilish humour. Day after day it seemed was a last chance saloon and still he emerged unscathed.

We loved Joe because he was so patently thrilled just to be on our screen, to still have reason to have his shirts pressed at quarter-final time. When he fought back to 11-13 in the semi-final against Matthew Stephens, it was time to give way to fairy stories.

By Saturday evening, it was clear it wouldn't happen. Joe gamely took the first frame of the session, but then they just wouldn't fall and his opponent strolled it.

But it didn't matter because we still got the gesture, the fleeting improvisation that sets him apart. Trailing 12-15 and seeing his one shot at the dream dissipating, Joe made a hash of a shot on a red, but he fluked another red and in the process almost snookered himself. The crowd tittered. Joe was on the ropes.

So what did he do? Walked up to the camera and threw us all a big jaunty wink. It was a spontaneous shrug of what-the-hell fatalism. And it told us what we knew: whatever qualities Joe lacks at the table, the guy's sure got class.