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Luke ‘the Nuke’ Littler lit a rocket under darts when the 16-year-old astonished and delighted fans in his storming run to the PDC World Darts Championship final last year.
He may have narrowly lost to Luke Humphries but in turn that sealed a sporting rivalry that seems set to run for years. At the same time Littler’s remarkable story turned a mainstream media spotlight onto the sport and solidified the Worlds as a fixture in the seasonal calendar.
“For Sky, the Worlds have always been huge along with football over that festive period, and over the past couple years darts has been on a rise,” says Joe Clark Smith, lead producer Sky Sports Darts. “We’ve seen our audience figures increasing since 2022 and then this time last year Luke Littler entered the scene and interest just kind of exploded.
“There’s always a niggle that it’s a flash in the pan and maybe people’s interest peaks during the Christmas period then fades away, but that’s not been the case whatsoever. The PDC put Luke Littler into the Premier League, which is an extremely prestigious invitational event, generating record viewing figures for our coverage of that event.”
The 2025 PDC World Darts Championship is taking place at Alexandra Palace in London from 13 December 2024 to 3 January 2025. Finalists will be whittled down from the 96 entrants competing for the Sid Waddell Trophy and £2.5 million in prize money.
The Littler ‘halo’ has seen all Sky darts events grow their audience during 2024 and Clark Smith says the same has been true for non-Sky darts broadcasts, including on ITV.
“What Littler has done is he’s brought eyes onto darts that are then sticking around to watch it. All of that has meant that this year the excitement and hype as we build towards the Worlds has been like no other year,” he says.
Clark Smith explains how Sky reacted to Littler’s meteoric rise to the top of the nation’s consciousness. “As soon as we saw those viewing numbers rising last year – and it grew every match that he played – we sought insights from the team at Sky. They broke down the demographics of the viewers so we knew there were a lot of under 21s and under 16s that were tuning in. We immediately changed our plans for the final which would have been a slightly longer build up and actual play starting later. We recognised that there were these younger audiences and since the final was on a Wednesday night we wanted them to be able to enjoy it and get to bed before school. We wanted the kids to be talking about it in the playground the next day.
“We rescheduled it a little earlier and we also asked our on-screen team to be a bit more accessible in their language. A lot of people new to the sport weren’t going to know what a big fish is or a champagne-finish, a nine darter or Shanghai. We’ve tried to continue that inclusivity throughout the year.
“The beauty of darts is even though you might be slightly baffled by the scoring system, it’s a very simple game to understand because of the graphics that we put on screen, how the commentators tell the story and the way the crowd reacts in the venue as well. As the excitement builds it’s a very easy sport to watch.”
Sky Sports is always refining its darts production, recently using split screens to show two angles at once and adding on-screen graphics displaying at-a-glance averages and even the time it takes each player on the oche.
“If a player is playing a lot slower than another player that again just adds to the story,” he says.
Returning is the FanCam, a handheld camera with shallow depth of field whose operator is permitted to join the players on stage for the last few practice darts and at the end of each match.
“That’s all about bringing player reactions right into the living room,” says Clark Smith.
New for this year is a Sky Sports backstage area for flash interviews with players before matches and a challenge area for celebs and VIPs to throw some arrows.
“We’ve lounge seating too for celebs, VIPs and players to relax and do some interviews in a slightly different way,” he continues. “That’s mainly social-first content led by reporters Joe Thomlinson and 12-year-old darts prodigy Jayden Walker (labelled the ‘next Luke Littler’) who brings in a younger audience.”
The production is also looking at utilising the decibel levels of applause in the arena this year which might be thrown on screen as a fun piece of information to compare the walk-ons of the players. This is being tested pre-Christmas with the hopes of using it live post-Christmas.
A crucial aspect of darts play is speed. It is a surprisingly fast sport but one that modern players seem intent on accelerating.
“It was a tricky sport to cover even in the 90s and 2000s but players have just got faster and faster. Michael Smith (current world number 2) can hit a three dart 180 in about one and a half seconds,” he adds.
“This new generation of players don’t go the traditional routes either. They go wacky routes maybe hitting the bull twice, they’ll do double tops twice and it can really throw even those who are used to the game.”
This year’s spotters, calling the next dart on talkback to the camera ops and director based on their expert knowledge of the game and of a particular player, are led by Keith Deller and Richard Ashdown.
Clark Smith continues: “Nobody’s perfect, and the players themselves will sometimes miscount. That’s the trickiness of covering darts because you’ve got the spotter saying treble 19, double 10. Then that goes to the cameras who need to get in position. Then the director needs to cut those cameras live. All of that had to happen in an extremely short amount of time to make sure we don’t miss a dart. Once you go remote the fractional latency that that entails would make darts very hard to cover. Going remote risks missing lots of darts hitting the board which is why we are still completely on site as an OB.”
That said, the graphics team at AE Live orchestrating the score and clock are remote at their base in Hemel Hempstead.
Because of the necessity to switch in a fraction of a second this is one of the few events where the director is also vision mixing.
“Not all directors can vision mix without looking down and that’s what you need to be able to do on darts,” says Clark Smith. “You can’t look away from your monitor stack for a second and miss something, so you have to be very, very adept at using the vision mixing desk and the remote control system where you can punch into the right shot.”
The robotic system has every segment of the dartboard programmed for camera move. The camera team sits just behind the stage listening to the spotter and as soon as the spotter calls it they punch in and the remote cameras quickly zoom in.
“One of the things that we’re always trying to maintain is the balance of making sure that we’re doing a show for the venue, so that the crowd in the venue keep that energy up and stay engaged while being aware that there’s a hundred times that many people watching at home expecting the Sky Sports treatment. Sound is a very, very important aspect of that,” he says.
“The crowds at Ally Pally can be rowdy with their songs and chanting which is all part of the unique atmosphere of the event. Some of the players can get very animated, and we want to hear their celebrations echoing around the arena. Then there’s the iconic thud of the dart hitting the board.”
Aside from live coverage of all 28 sessions across the Championship, totalling around 110 hours, Sky is also producing highlights of every session which are available on-demand and will also populate the Sky Sports Darts channel during 24-26 December and New Year’s Eve when there is no live play.
“We’ve also got a lot of long-form content we’ve been creating throughout this year (including a Luke vs Luke: A Date with Destiny interview with the two players who made last year’s final) and tons of archive from 31 years covering this event,” he adds.
Sky also has a new three-part documentary series Game of Throws: Inside Darts transmitting now which goes behind the scenes of the 2023 finals.
With heightened scrutiny on the Championships this year does Clark Smith find time to rest over the three-week period?
“You get into a bubble, in the zone, and really it’s your team that helps get you through it,” he says. “One of the beauties of everybody being on site is you can share that energy of everyone being together and collaborating.
“Seeing how much coverage the sport was getting was incredible too. Seeing darts on the front page as well as the back page gives you so much energy to keep going.
“Those three days off over Christmas help the players who can go home and have a little bit of a time to switch off. It’s the same for the production crew. Just being able to recharge the batteries for that final push from the 27 onwards.”
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