I was looking at Eric Bristow's flat when he died and his demise hit me hard, says ex-BBC darts host Bobby George
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BOBBY GEORGE says the sudden death of long-time drinking and darts pal Eric Bristow seven years ago 'hit me hard'.
And his new book details the duo's many escapades.
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Darts great Eric Bristow passed away seven years ago
Credit: REX
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The former world champion passed away aged 60
Credit: GETTY
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Long-time pal Bobby George has opened up on the passing of the beloved Bristow
Credit: GETTY
They first met in the 1970s and became oche rivals — they contested the 1980 World Darts Championship final — but also 'very good friends'.
According to George, the five-time world champion would be 'good as gold until about 10 or 10.30pm — then he'd become a complete a***hole once he had drunk too much'.
The King of Bling, claimed Hackney-born Bristow would be 'rude, arrogant, leery and happy to pick a fight with anyone . . . I didn't like him when he was like that, no one did'.
Yet the Crafty Cockney never wavered in his strong loyalty towards George, 11 years the senior man, whom he called Bo.
Bristow — one of the sport's greatest throwers — died on April 5, 2018 from a heart attack before a Premier League event in Liverpool. He was 60.
Writing in Still Here! The King of Bling, George, 79, said: 'Eric Bristow's death hit me hard.
'He was only 60 for f***'s sake. That's no age these days, is it? I had known him since he was a teenager — and he never changed.
'He could be a pain in the a*** and we had some right ding-dongs over the years.
List of all-time Darts World Champions
BELOW is a list of darts world champions by year.
The list does not include winners from the pre-Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) era or BDO world champions.
That means Raymond van Barneveld, for example, is only listed once - Barney also won four BDO titles - and none of Eric Bristow's five BDO titles are included. 1994 - Dennis Priestley
1995 - Phil Taylor
1996 - Phil Taylor (2)
1997 - Phil Taylor (3)
1998 - Phil Taylor (4)
1999 - Phil Taylor (5)
2000 - Phil Taylor (6)
2001 - Phil Taylor (7)
2002 - Phil Taylor (8)
2003 - John Part
2004 - Phil Taylor (9)
2005 - Phil Taylor (10)
2006 - Phil Taylor (11)
2007 - Raymond van Barneveld
2008 - John Part (2)
2009 - Phil Taylor (12)
2010 - Phil Taylor (13)
2011 - Adrian Lewis
2012 - Adrian Lewis (2)
2013 - Phil Taylor (14)
2014 - Michael van Gerwen
2015 - Gary Anderson
2016 - Gary Anderson (2)
2017 - Michael van Gerwen (2)
2018 - Rob Cross
2019 - Michael van Gerwen (3)
2020 - Peter Wright
2021 - Gerwyn Price
2022 - Peter Wright (2)
2023 - Michael Smith
2024 - Luke Humphries
2025 - Luke Littler
Most World Titles 14 - Phil Taylor
3 - Michael van Gerwen
2 - John Part, Adrian Lewis, Gary Anderson, Peter Wright
1 - Dennis Priestley, Raymond van Barneveld, Rob Cross, Gerwyn Price, Michael Smith, Luke Humphries, Luke Littler
'But for most of the time, he was my mate and we had some great times together.'
On the night Bristow died, George was on Merseyside, working at Shooters Bar and Diner. The pair had 'a little catch-up and I got him a Guinness'.
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That night, George stayed in a Stoke pub run by Barry Birch, Bristow's former driver.
And he was even looking at 'Eric's flat' less than 200 yards away when he learned the tragic news.
George said: 'I couldn't believe the suddenness of his passing.
'Nor could I take in the fact that I could see his flat — the same flat he'd have left just a few hours earlier — as I was trying to take in the tragic news.
'What were the odds of it? Me being with him, saying goodbye, going to Stoke and looking out of a window at his flat whilst stood alongside his former driver?
'We both needed a stiff drink that night. They reckon Eric's heart must have stopped before he hit the ground as there was no blood.
'In his diary, apparently, he'd written he had got bad chest pains.
"Bloody hell, if that was the case, why didn't he go to the doctors or hospital and get it sorted?
'Knowing Eric, he probably thought, 'I'll put loads of Guinness down my neck, that'll get rid of the pain'.
'Anyone who knew him was aware that he didn't exactly lead a healthy lifestyle.
I had known him since he was a teenager — and he never changed."
Bobby George on Eric Bristow
'For as long as I'd known him, he was a heavy smoker, always rolling his own.
'And he would think nothing of getting through 15 or 16 pints of Guinness in a day, rounding it all off with a curry. Nobody's body can handle that day in, day out.
'Always on the go, working and travelling, meant he was always pushing it.
"Although it wasn't work to him, just a chance to get on the p*** every day.
'I like a drink and a smoke but there are extremes and Eric pushed them to the limit.
'I'd say, 'You smoke and you drink too much'.
He said, 'I know all about that, Bob. But put it this way, no one is going to be pushing me around in a wheelchair. When I go, I'll go like that. Bang'. And he f***ing did as well, bang.'
George first encountered the 'mouthy so-and-so' while playing in a BDO event at Margate in Kent.
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Bobby George knew the late Eric Bristow when he was a teenager
Credit: GETTY
He said: 'After that we became good mates and he would do anything for me, anything.'
As they toured the country, they 'would share prize money', but there were times when George thought 'we're going to get our heads kicked in' due to Bristow's OTT antics.
On a US tour in 1978, the first time George went on a plane, Bristow enraged locals by pretending 'to wipe his a***' with the American Stars and Stripes flag 'before chucking it on the floor'.
George said: 'The atmosphere had turned really toxic and I was worried that someone was going to do something really stupid, like pull a gun out on him.
''Watch yourself, Eric,' I whispered in his ear. 'These guys aren't messing about and they have guns over here!'
'I'd like to say that was an isolated incident but it wasn't.
'That's how he was, always getting into trouble. But somehow always managing to get himself out of it.'
Still Here! The King of Bling, published by Pitch Publishing, is out now, £25.
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My feelings about the NHS are well recorded. I think it is our greatest institution. But at the same time, I also believe it's our worst employer. I don't know if it's missing kindness or empathy or it just doesn't treat people like adults.' Occasionally he did get help, just not from the NHS. Shaken when a one-night stand referred to him as a 'big lad', he developed an eating disorder, a kind of variation of bulimia in which he chewed crisps, biscuits, nuts and chocolates, masticated to suck out their 'goodness', and then spat out the resulting cud into toilets or a bucket in his room. He became exhausted from lack of nutrition. His skin developed eczema. His eyes hollowed. Finally, a friend chanced on the undigested remains in an 80-litre plastic bin in his bedroom, confronted him and said he needed help. He did not seek it, but did stop, for a while. Today, I can report, Kay is perfectly right-sized. Over lunch he gets only halfway through his panini, but then I get no further with mine. They are disgusting. • My secret eating disorder, by Adam Kay I ask whether an NHS worker suffering from any other chronic illnesses would receive help or whether it has a special blind spot for mental health. 'I think that's magnified tenfold if it's mental illness and that's why I work a lot with a charity called Doctors in Distress.' And he was in distress, wasn't he? 'I was in distress. Not all the time, but a lot of the time, and I was a lot more distressed after I left. And now I get help. And now I'm in a good place, which is good.' At the National Book Awards, where This Is Going to Hurt won three prizes, 2018 GETTY IMAGES But it is paradoxical that he didn't get the help when he was actually working with doctors. 'I didn't get the help. I wasn't offered the help. But it's an organisation that doesn't like to offer help. It's an organisation that traditionally says, 'You're a bloody doctor. Bloody get on with it.' And if you have to refer to your boss by their surname, it's very difficult to open up to them.' And this is dangerous? 'It is. Correct. There is a reason that the suicide rates in the healthcare professions are higher than average. I don't know what the reason quite is, but it's undeniable that there is one. And even if no one is interested in finding out what the reason is, surely everyone should be trying to support everyone more to make that graph turn a corner.' As well as Doctors in Distress, he works with the Laura Hyde Foundation, set up after the suicide of the nurse Laura Hyde in 2018. 'I was very low, but I never got to that place,' he says. 'But [the suicide rate] is one doctor every three weeks in the UK. I think one nurse or other healthcare professional every single week. Those numbers are unbearably high.' And the BBC version of This Is Going to Hurt featured the suicide of a young doctor. 'That was the first scene I wrote. That was what the show was all about.' Although he is 'not president of Matt Hancock's fan club', he does give the former Tory health secretary credit for one thing. He met him in his 'sex palace' a couple of times and pointed out there was no helpline for medical staff to call for support with their stress. A couple of months later, Hancock launched a helpdesk for doctors, expanding nationally what had been a London-only service for GPs. 'Matt Hancock is entirely responsible for that and I'm hugely grateful.' He did not get on with Hancock's predecessor, Jeremy Hunt, and while he met the current health secretary Wes Streeting at an award ceremony and he seemed 'dead nice and smart', he finds himself edging towards the 'lazy criticism' that politicians are all the same. The NHS never heals. • Adam Kay needles Jeremy Hunt over doctor memoir 'The NHS is definitely more of a war zone now. I wrote about the good old days, it turns out,' he says of Tony Blair's years of plenty. He is, of course, backing the latest junior, now resident, doctors' strikes. 'Nice people are drawn to helping people and thank goodness for them. We should treasure them and we should pay them. We should give them a break room and we should let them have a fortnight off for their honeymoon and we should do all the other stuff.' But, he adds, the doctors do not need his support, or for that matter the public's. They have a plan B, which is to work abroad, he says — and indeed the General Medical Council the day after we meet reports that one in five NHS doctors is considering either doing just that or leaving medicine completely. 'I don't know,' he says of the strikers' 29 per cent 'non-negotiable' pay claim. 'I just think it will prove good value for money to keep people alive. And there was some quite aggressive thing [Streeting] said about, you know, 'They're going to regret it if…' ' In fact he told them, 'If you go to war with us you'll lose.' • Adam Kay's diary of a new dad: this is going to… scream! 'They're not going to regret it. They're going to leave. You're going to regret it, because they've left. And then you'll be saying, 'But I've doubled all the medical school places.' But it takes four, five, six years to be a doctor, whichever route you take. That doesn't help you with the A&E consultant who has just left, who's 15 years further on.' In the end, the only cure for this particular physician who could not heal himself was not to emigrate but to leave the profession. It worked a treat. 'I've got a work-life balance. I don't have tragedy in my workplace. I have so much respect for the people who are still out there doing it.' His work-life imbalance as a doctor has recently been replaced by another equation: balancing his needs and those of his children, a boy and a girl born in the United States to two separate friends of theirs, but sharing a common egg donor. He shows me on his phone a picture of Ruby and Ziggy, now both around two and a half. They are, of course, adorable, but Ruby arrived five weeks early and weighed just 4lb 6oz and Kay missed her birth (Farrell just made it). 'I sort of slightly thought I was done with labour wards… But no, she's great. They're both great. I'm dead lucky. It recalibrates life in lots of ways, doesn't it? There are these people who are right now 30 miles away, 40 miles away, whatever it is, who are more important to me than me, and are distracting me the whole time, who didn't exist three years ago. You realise how selfish you were. Although selfish isn't necessarily a bad word. It's important to look after yourself.' And he did look after himself. By quitting, I mean. 'I did in the end, that's true. I wouldn't say I wouldn't change anything — I'd change absolutely loads. But I'm a very happy boy.' So if there is ever a saccharine, revisionist Hollywood movie of this caustic former doctor's eventful life, we can be certain it won't be as good as the telly version of This Is Going to Hurt. At least, however, it will be entitled to deliver an unexpectedly sappy and upbeat ending. n A Particularly Nasty Case by Adam Kay (Orion, £20) is published on August 28. To order a copy, go to or call 020 3176 2935. Free standard UK P&P on online orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
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