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Teaupgrading pdc World Darts Championship It’s a terrible operation. Planning started 11 months ago, the day before yesterday luke littler won world title Last January. In total, there are 23 cameras, 56 microphones (including five hidden mics embedded in the board to deliver that iconic “thunk” sound), with 200 sleep-deprived people deployed to broadcast every dart thrown across 144 hours of action.
It’s an orchestra, and at its heart is the conductor, sky sports Director Tim Brown, who I find hunched over in the back of an extendable truck that sits amid the trailers and temporary structures backstage. After a few minutes in the dimly lit room, it becomes immediately clear why his role has been called “the hardest job in television”, as Brown pans our picture for six seconds across the stage, the cheering crowd and the board, each player visiting Oche again and again.
Every orchestra needs someone counting the time in a dark corner, and at Alexandra Palace that person is known as the spotter. That’s why our TV screens zoom to treble 19 before the darts leave the player’s fingers, and it’s the spotter’s predictive powers that ensure camera operators know which of the many checkout routes they’ll take.
There are four roving spotters at this year’s championship, and today I found Charlie Corstorphine in the hot seat behind the director. Corstorphine is also a match referee; His mesmerizing skill is to complete potential checkouts at double-fast speed and to deeply know the favorite areas of dartboard players. He can read three different solutions to the question of how to get from 121 to zero faster than I can multiply by three 16s. Or two, think about it.
Corstorphine guides camera operators, producers and directors who hang on his every word. “Okay, up first,” he says into his microphone, panning the wide-angle camera to the top half of the board as rising star Charlie Manby moves towards Oche needing 90 to win the leg. “Treble 20 for double 15. If he hits a single, treble 20 for bull or double five…”
Manby hits single 20. “Staying up! 20 for a bull, or triple for a double five…”
Manby again hits a single 20. “Bullseye! Bullseye!” A distant “wooah” is heard in the room as the director turns the camera just in time to see Manby’s third dart miss the bull by millimeters.
Corstorphine knows whether a player prefers to finish on top (double 20) or 16, although it is not always so straightforward. For example, Luke Littler has always played in the top or 10, but recently he has started preferring 16 and eight, which has troubled spotters. And when Littler starts showboating, it’s anyone’s guess.
“He’s reinventing checkouts all the time, there aren’t a lot of traditional routes he works on,” says Corstorphine during a break between sets. “Especially some setup shots. For example, at 306. Most players will go to treble 19, treble 19, then bull, but what he does is he goes to 57, then he goes to the bull, and comes back to 19. It still leaves a finish, but it’s a different way of doing things.”
Who is the hardest player to read? “I would probably say Madars Razma,” he says, referring to the 37-year-old known as the Latvian Razmataz. “Sometimes he likes to switch at 19, or start the leg at 19, so that makes it harder for us.”
If Corstorphine is refereeing an evening after an intense session spotting for the cameras, it could be a long day. “It can be mentally exhausting, it can be hard to remember all these different scores and combinations. But there are worse things I could do,” he says, smiling.
In the depths of Alexandra Palace is another dark room where camera operators are listening intently to Corstorphine’s instructions coming down from the truck above. One of them is Chris Pendlebury, whose fingers are moving over a specially designed dartboard screen that, when a number is touched, automatically fixes our TV picture on that section of the board. With one touch, he can select a preset zoom anywhere on the board for those clutch moments at the end of the foot.
It is equally fast-paced and only a few people know how to operate its screen at full tilt. As a result, the few people who do work too many hours. “I usually fall asleep at my Christmas dinner,” he says.
Further exploration behind the scenes reveals two men climbing a long ladder and sitting directly behind the stage, next to wire mics mounted behind the board, operating crowd tracking cameras. Sky Sports presenter Anna Woolhouse is sitting in a goldfish bowl high above the auditorium, ready to present the show, while below her sit the commentators in a cramped metal box, watching on four screens with copious notes in front of them and the constant chatter of producers in their ears.
Darts has always been a complex game to broadcast, but nowadays it is bigger and more sophisticated than ever. Littler’s emergence attracted Sky Sports’ highest ever non-football audience as more than 4 million watched the talented 16-year-old lose to Luke Humphries in the 2024 final. The game has exploded; You can see this in the facts of this year’s tournament, where there are more players than ever before and a record prize pool of £5 million, with £1 million at stake for the eventual winner.
It has become what camera operator Pendlebury describes as “the Wimbledon of winter”, in the sense that, for a few weeks each year, it attracts a far wider audience than just darts fans. At Christmas in a nutshell, darts is the centerpiece of the playing scene.
Millions are again eager to see if Littler can retain his crown, a feat that Gary Anderson had not achieved a decade earlier. The entire show will be broadcast in his living room. And they won’t know it, but their eyes will be directed by someone out of sight, who will only have a microphone and encyclopedic knowledge of the board.