Proles apart
Simon Barnes
WE are all middle class now, said Tony Blair, who clearly hasn't been to the Circus Tavern, Purtleet. for a while. This strange place is a triumph of ergonomics: a 1,200seat boozer capable of moving in a shorter space of time more lager from barrel to bladder than anywhere outside Bavaria. Naturally, it is the spiritual home of darts. The world championships have been taking place there all this week.
Attending a darts world championship is not the cosiest middle-class experience available in this country — I have attended world championships at the Circus Tavern, at the Lakeside in Surrey and also at Mice's in Stoke, so I speak as a person of experience.
A darts world championship is not an easy thing for the sort of person who eats sushi in Islington, takes the kids roller-blading on Highbury Fields, and double-parks the never muddy Range Rover with easy aplomb. So far as I remember, you can get a cup of tea at the Circus Tavern, but I wouldn't ask for Earl Grey if I were you.
The walk from the station to the Tavern is an education in itself to those who live sheltered lives: light industry delivered with that mixture of bleakness and despair that the Thames Estuary does so well. Once inside, don't ask for a non-smoking table, and probably best not ask for a bottle of Perrier.
It is a place full of flushed pink flesh — lots and lots of it. It is full of the frankly overweight: great wobbling fleshy arms; white T-shirts with pale pink flesh shining through the fabric; pink, shaven (what. me — bald?) heads. It is also very cheerful: darts lacks the martial traditions of football. It is more like a night at the dogs, when you have a bet and a drink and a laugh as you cheer your money away.
The sport, like dog-racing, is much derided, both of them apparently proof against gentrification. But darts provides a brutal examination of courage and nerve under extreme pressure. Since this is the basis of all the best kinds of sport, from Lord's, Wimbledon and Smith's Lawn all the way to Purfleet, it is clear that anti-darts prejudice is mere snobbery. But the ancient British class-system is part of the fabric of darts, part of the attraction of darts, just as the ghetto and the whiff of gangsterisrn are part of the joy of boxing. Darts wants to be gentrified every bit as much as boxing wants to be cleaned up.
You wonder if the world of the Circus Tavern is a time warp, or whether it represents the eternally hermetic nature of British society — a matter expressed with greater clarity in sport than in any other walk of life. The recent report on race stressed how little normal easy contact exists between races; the Circus Tavern shows us that the same phenomenon exists between people of the same colour.
Darts is another country; they do things differently there. The Circus Tavern is not hostile, so long as you don't drop your fag in your neighbour's lager, but you won't find too many people there with a subscription to The Spectator. And a half instead of a pint? Might as well turn up in a frock.
Before you make any rash remarks about the aspirational classlessness and the fluid social boundaries of new Britain, I suggest you spend an evening at the Circus Tavern. And try to catch a night on which Phil `the Power' Taylor is playing. He's the business.
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