The 1985 World Snooker Final. Social History
The BBC has placed the final frame of the 1985 World Snooker final on the IPlayer. Dennis Taylor beat Steve Davis 18-17 and the final frame went down to the last ball over 75 minutes.
As with the 2025 Championship it was played at the Crucible in Sheffield and came at a time when the key figure in snooker, Barry Hearn, was trying to professionalise the image of the sport.
The final was televised then as now on BBC2 and it holds the record for a post midnight viewing public at 18.5m. Reportedly it cost the BBC £20m to cover the championships 40 years ago, one of the most viewed sporting occasions of the year- primarily because it goes on for a fortnight and sessions take place in the evening when people can watch.
Of course there was no IPlayer or social media in 1985 so you either watched it live or missed it.
It is certainly social history now although the actual snooker is much the same. It took place at the end of April 1985 just weeks after the end of the 1984/5 miners strike and Sheffield was a key NUM location.
Back then commentary was sparse- viewers were left to draw their own conclusions- and there was absolutely no shouting. Camerawork and lighting have improved a lot over the years.
Both Taylor and Davis are commentating for the BBC this year. Davis in 1985 was known as ‘interesting’ because he wasn’t. Things have changed. A few years back sitting in Mother Kellys a craft beer bar in Bethnal Green (named because it’s on Paradise Row, the actual doorstep is a few doors down) I noticed someone who looked like Steve Davis. It was in fact Steve Davis who nowadays is a craft beer enthusiast. He can also be found playing DJ sets in craft beers in NE London & indeed around the UK..
More precisely, Steve Davis was called ‘Interesting’, because he wasn’t, by the satirical puppet show Spitting Image, in which the Davis puppet himself suggests that, because other players have nicknames, he would like to be known as ‘Interesting’. Davis later had an autobiography called ‘Interesting’.