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Series 1: Episode 1

The first episode explores how Alex 'The Hurricane' Higgins helped transform snooker from a game played in the backrooms of working men’s clubs to a national sporting obsession.\n\nInterest in the sport had been growing thanks to the new possibilities of colour broadcasting, and in particular the weekly snooker show Pot Black, first commissioned by none other than David Attenborough. But it was the antics of the unpredictable Ulstersman and snooker genius, Higgins, that took the game stratospheric.\n\nRaw and unpredictable on the table, outspoken and badly behaved off it, Higgins declared war on the 1970s snooker establishment, entering into a years-long rivalry with the man who more than anyone embodied the old guard, ex-policeman Ray Reardon. Higgins and Reardon didn’t see eye to eye, but it was well known that Higgins could start a fight in an empty room. As the 70s wore on, the tabloids gleefully reported on a string of on- and off-the-table misdeeds.\n\nAlmost inevitably, Reardon and Higgins eventually came face to face in the World Championship final of 1982, in what was by far the biggest tournament to date. The clash of the two snooker titans - the paragon of the establishment against the self-described ‘People’s Champion’ - would be the match that redefined the British public’s relationship with the sport and set the course for a decade where it would become box office gold.

Source: BBC 2