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 Yesterday afternoon, a player who was on the eve
of his debut in a PDC televised event wandered into the arena of The Citywest Conference Centre in Dublin where I, as Event Director of The
SkyBet World Grand Prix, was along with a host of other TV production and event staff, putting the finishing touches to the whole show ready for
broadcast. He stared in wonder, slack-jawed, at the sixteen foot high by forty-two foot wide stage set upon which he would tread in the hours to
come. He tripped over the snaking coils of yards and yards of electrical cables resembling the roots of tropical trees. He was like an explorer
chancing upon a huge alien monolith hidden deep in the jungle. He uttered those immortal words of Stanley when he found Livingstone, “Holy crap!”
Playing in his local tavern would never be the same again.
As we approach 2005, the PDC has in place plans to stage sixteen separate
TV events up from this years crop of six. That entails a serious amount of expense, time and pressure on all the background staff associated with
getting the show to the screen. Players, schmayers, ALL they got to do is show up! So what does it take to stage this extravaganza?
Well, it all starts around nine months to a year before. The location for any
TV event is not some random choice of sticking a pin in a map of the world. You see, we’ve got to be reasonably confident that folk, the paying
customers, are going to show up to watch it and be an animated crowd. It’s an important ingredient for atmosphere. Silence, or at best polite applause,
is not what we’re looking for, attendees of The Desert Classic please note! Television, our partners in crime, has a major say in the location, first from
the basic premise of the practicality of getting a ‘live’ signal out. All PDC darts coverage is seen ‘live’, as it happens, in the UK whether it’s staged in
Las Vegas or London. That means the signal is via satellite or fibre, and if that presents a major difficulty, then we take the event someplace else, no
matter how attractive it may be to the PDC. Second, power, or the lack of it,
is a major concern. TV needs a lot and ‘surges’ or worse still ‘blackouts’ are critical problems should they occur, which is why independent backup
generators are essential pieces of the kit
OK, lets imagine we have those critical criteria covered off. Now the building
itself has to get its boxes ticked. Out back we need ‘hard standing’ for two 45’ trailer/truck units of outside broadcast hardware, including a full blown
facilities studio, editing suite and so on, plus a catering truck and security mobile. Gotta feed (and protect) the troops and chowing down the local
Mickey Dees would not be acceptable. Union rules state “all production staff must have two meals a day provided on location and these must comprise
three choices, one of which must be vegetarian.” Don’t know how these good catering folk whip up pretty acceptable dishes from the back of what is at
times a small donut truck, but they do. If the crew are hungry, they tend to get feisty and that means the work slows up. So, full bellies mean good work.
Once outside is ‘thumbed up’, we go inside to the auditorium. ‘TV Darts’
work best in old-fashioned night clubs, but these locations are getting scarcer by the day. Their successors, discos, are, nine times outta ten, totally
unacceptable. Too many pillars, too many different floor levels, appalling ‘sight lines’ and not on the ground floor, let alone having no dressing rooms or
areas for practice. That means we look at leisure or conference centers and hotel convention rooms. In most cases these have great access for fork lifts
for off loading equipment trucks. The PDC generally takes two 7.5 ton trucks or one truck and a 40’ trailer/tractor unit, depending on the format, to all TV
shows. We’ve got some serious amount of stuff to truck around!
As I said before, a ground floor arena is preferable. Anything above that
means the need for a sizable freight lift, or like the MGM in Vegas, a long ramp out back to give that essential truck access. Once ‘get in’ is cool,
ceiling height must be considered. This requirement usually knocks out most UK hotels, which unlike American ones, seem to have a blind spot on
this issue. We need at least twenty foot (or six and a bit metres if you’re on
this side of the Atlantic) as a bare minimum in order to rig TV lights. If its too low, then you end up rigging them on the horizontal which tends to blind
Players and spectators which is not really advisable. American locations are pretty much perfect in this respect.
A big ‘in house’ stage is not really a deal breaker as we bring in our own
most times. TV stages need to be no more than three feet high from the floor otherwise you start to screw with some camera positions, the master shots
that focus on the board. A two-foot stage deck is ideal, which we then carpet and then rig the set upon it leaving a ten-foot gap behind for two more camera
positions. In all, our TV has fifteen cameras to catch all the action.
We’re getting there. Now for all the ancillary rooms and necessary space for
a studio and commentary box. The latter are temporary and constructed on site starting with scaffolding frames and deck with wooden side panels and
roof plus a plexi glass front. They are airless dungeons in truth, an oppressive claustrophobic atmosphere barely relieved by air conditioning and
iced water, which dictates the ‘jocks’ doing one match on and one off to stay healthy.
For the players, a practice room must have a bathroom, usually space for
three to four free standing boards, a lounging area and of course a well stocked bar! It needs to be pretty big, and ideally, adjacent to the stage. It
really puts smiles on faces if there is another room next door for players wives, kids, parents, lovers and best pals as they are barred from practice
rooms. You’d be surprised (or maybe you would not) how many players guests consider they have an ‘unalienable right’ to be in the practice room.
At the end of the day, we want the players to perform to the best of their
ability, so taking care of their nearest and dearest is not a stretch, though working out just who they are is, hence the issuing of those all important
‘back stage access all area’ passes.
Sound over the top? Trust me, it isn’t. Unfortunately, some players want
restricted access for the close folk of OTHER players, their own folk being welcome and having a sound and solid good reason for unlimited access.
The Press Room needs to be on top of the action as the journalists want to
be close to the players for that ‘face to face’ comment at the ecstasy of victory and the agony of defeat. It’s rigged with a direct broadcast feed and
hooked up with phone and ISDN (DSL) lines for online access, all brought in for the duration of the event. These rooms need to be pretty big. At The
World Championship, over forty journalists use this room daily, coming either from The Dailies or The Glossies. A radio room sits next door where a ‘radio
jock’ sends out live and recorded pieces to International, National and regional radio.
Finally, we protect the whole lot with a ring of security, to not only protect
players, but also some seriously expensive hardware. We either bring in our own or pull it from the venue itself, although my preference would always be
for own as they understand our needs and more importantly they have the trust of the players and the PDC.
We can never forget the needs of the audience either. The venue
management almost never believe me when I advise them of how much alcohol they will sell over any given day or week. First timers always have to
restock way before they’d planned to and rarely make the same mistake twice. Price is a sensitive issue at first too. They are advised to pitch their
prices at tavern levels. If they unwisely hike them, the bulging Piggly Wiggly bags soon appear on the arms of the fans as they enter. You certainly will
not find dart fans and players in a temperance meeting.
Lastly, the crew, Officials and TV production folk must be considered, without
whom there would just not be a show. They work, most times, almost around the clock before the TV tournament begins. It takes about three days
to fully rig a show with about thirty PDC and TV riggers on site at any one time. Once we go ‘live’, the numbers swell to around eighty. That means
hotels and travel to organize and scheduling ‘what’ arrives on site ‘when’. Get that wrong and your day gets pretty screwed. Once the show is over, the
‘load out’ is done in about a day – always quicker to pull it down that put it up!
Well, that’s it. So many folk have asked me to give a little insight to how it
all comes together. I could have written a piece twice as long, but for fear of sending some to sleep, I’ve reined it in. Whenever we are about to start a
new show and I do my final ‘walk through’ to see that everything is in place and we’re ready to go, I often reflect, “It’s just a game of Darts (though not
quite an ordinary one).”
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