04-05-2025
Why we're hypnotised by snooker on TV
Ask people to name a groundbreaking example of man making contact with a chalky white sphere in July 1969 and they are likely to say Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 moon landing. A snooker fan, however, will recall Ray Reardon's masterly control of the cue ball in the inaugural episode of BBC2's Pot Black. Half a century later, snooker remains synonymous with the medium of television.
This, in many ways, should be unsurprising. Today and tomorrow, the most prestigious match in the snooker calendar, the final of the World Snooker Championship, will be watched by a smaller crowd than Weston-super-Mare AFC in the sixth tier of English football. The Crucible theatre, home to the championships since 1977, holds just 980 people. A game played on a 12x6ft table is not a natural mass spectator sport.
So, the love affair between snooker and television is perfectly logical. But what great love affair was ever founded on logic alone? There is something more subtle, more primal going on. There is chemistry.
In a recent essay for The New Yorker, the author Sally Rooney described a frame of snooker as 'an apparently chaotic jumble [that] slowly reveals its hidden form'. In his book Deep Pockets: Snooker and the Meaning of Life, Brendan Cooper says the game is like 'a kind of hearth, a breathing fire in the living rooms of the world'.
The commentators certainly sound as though they could be sitting on the sofa beside you: Dennis Taylor working his way through a packet of Rich Tea, Steve Davis with the family dog asleep at his feet. With its brushed carpet surface, polished metal highlights and sturdy wooden frame, even the snooker table suggests a kind of domesticity, with much in common with the typical British living room.
From the inception of snooker on TV, the footage has largely been captured from a single, recurring angle, the one you are likely to be picturing in your head as you read. The camera hovers overhead at the foot of the table, altering its rectangular shape into a kind of foreshortened parallelogram. Just as the action fits on to the table, so the table fits on to the screen.
'It's not exactly a bird's-eye view,' says Petra Szemán, a visual artist and lecturer at Newcastle University. 'If it was a fully top-down view, you'd really feel that it had nothing to do with your body — that the human is not in the equation.' Instead, we see the match both through the eyes of the player and as an observer. 'You're right in the middle of everything,' says Taylor, who is in his fifth decade of commentating for the BBC. 'You could be standing at the table yourself.'
Each frame begins with an ordered image — the triangle of red balls, the pattern of other colours in their starting positions — which is immediately broken into chaos before sequentially being returned to another, emptier kind of order as the balls are potted and disappear. On the simplest of levels, this process is rewarding to watch. There is an inherent satisfaction to the image of a table being gradually cleared — one that, broadcast into our living rooms, could be seen as tidying up.
Andrew Klevan, a professor of film aesthetics at Oxford University, draws a contrast with football, where aesthetic beauty is achieved by finding a rare moment of coherence — scoring a goal — amid 90 minutes of chaos and disorder. 'Snooker is about clearing up mess. There's something very satisfying in that.'
For Alan Male, the head of illustration at Falmouth University, it's the appearance of the balls, which 'totally conflict with our psychological perceptions of colour'. The black, with its connotations of 'coldness, death [and] nothingness' is worth the most points; while the red ball — signalling 'passion, danger, aggression, energy [and] vigour' — is worth the least.
It is no coincidence that snooker's popularity took off with the introduction of colour television, with Pot Black specifically commissioned by a young David Attenborough to showcase the BBC's colour service. Overnight the game turned from a working man's pastime into a national obsession. 'Once they started watching,' Taylor remembers, 'people got hooked.'
• Read our coverage of the World Snooker Championship
Snooker's audience is notably mixed. 'The way the game was played fascinated everybody,' says Taylor, who says just as many women watch the sport as men. Taylor partially attributes this to the players' smart waistcoats.
The game's popularity may have dipped since its 1980s heyday, but for devotees it remains more than a sport. Both snooker and its TV coverage are throwbacks. They are reassuring. Like the smell of home-cooked food wafting in from the kitchen or the crackle of a stylus nestled into a well-worn groove.
Snooker doesn't happen in 60-second bursts. Even its surprises seem to happen in slow motion. The balls sound just as you would hope they would sound, just as you would imagine if you had been watching on mute. They are potted. And then they are respotted by the spectral presence of a white-gloved referee to sit obediently atop their marker until the laws of physics crash into them and send them rolling towards their destiny once again.
The sport itself can be beautiful. The broadcast's greatest virtue is knowing not to get in the way. It is, says the 2005 world champion, Shaun Murphy, 'a safe space. It feels like the TV's giving you a cuddle.'
The final of the 2025 World Snooker Championship is live from the Crucible on BBC2 and iPlayer, today and on Monday
